aws
356 articles on aws — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
AWS Managed Prometheus cost: per sample ingested and stored
Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus bills per metric sample ingested, per query processed, and for storage. High-cardinality metrics and short scrape intervals drive ingestion cost. Here is how the model works and how to control cardinality.
AWS Managed Grafana cost: per active user, by role
Amazon Managed Grafana bills per active user per month, by role (editor or viewer), plus optional add-ons. Cost scales with your user base, not dashboards or data. Here is how the per-user model works and how to keep it lean.
AWS Keyspaces cost: serverless Cassandra billed per request and GB
Keyspaces (managed Cassandra) bills read and write request units, storage per GB-month, and optional features, with on-demand and provisioned capacity modes. It scales to zero with no clusters to manage. Here is how it prices versus self-managed Cassandra.
AWS S3 Express One Zone cost: pay more to store, less per request
S3 Express One Zone charges far higher storage (around $0.16/GB-month) but much lower per-request costs than S3 Standard, in a single AZ for low latency. For request-heavy, latency-sensitive workloads it can be cheaper overall. Here is the math.
AWS DynamoDB global tables cost: you replicate writes and storage
Global tables replicate a DynamoDB table across regions, so you pay replicated write capacity, storage in every region, and cross-region replication transfer. The multiplier is the number of regions. Here is when multi-region is worth it.
AWS EFS throughput modes: Bursting, Elastic, and Provisioned cost
EFS charges storage plus, depending on throughput mode, either nothing extra (Bursting), per throughput used (Elastic), or per provisioned throughput. Picking the wrong mode over-pays or throttles. Here is how the modes price and when to use each.
CloudFront Functions vs Lambda@Edge cost: lightweight vs full compute
CloudFront Functions cost about $0.10 per million invocations for lightweight viewer logic; Lambda@Edge bills per request plus duration for heavier compute across more event types. Choosing the lighter tool where it fits cuts edge cost. Here is the comparison.
The cheapest AWS region: how much location affects your bill
AWS prices the same service differently by region, sometimes 10 to 50 percent apart. us-east-1 is often the cheapest, but latency, data residency, and transfer between regions complicate a naive move. Here is how region choice affects cost.
AWS Direct Connect cost: port hours plus cheaper data transfer out
Direct Connect bills a port-hour fee by connection speed plus data transfer out at rates well below internet egress. For high, steady traffic to AWS it pays back the port fee; for low volume it does not. Here is the model.
AWS Site-to-Site VPN cost: cheap per connection, plus egress
Site-to-Site VPN bills about $0.05 per connection-hour (roughly $36/month) plus standard data transfer out. It is a cheap, quick way to connect on-premises to AWS over the internet. Here is the model and when to prefer Direct Connect.
AWS Storage Gateway cost: you pay for the AWS storage it fronts
Storage Gateway charges for the AWS storage it writes to (S3, EBS snapshots, or virtual tapes), requests, and data transfer, plus a per-gateway fee on some types. The bulk of the bill is the backing storage. Here is the model.
AWS QuickSight cost: authors, readers, and SPICE capacity
QuickSight bills per author (a monthly subscription) and per reader (session-based with a monthly cap), plus SPICE in-memory capacity beyond the included allowance. Matching author and reader licensing to real usage is the main lever. Here is the model.
AWS Bedrock cost: per token on-demand, or provisioned throughput
Bedrock bills per 1,000 input and output tokens on-demand, with rates varying by model, plus a provisioned-throughput option (per model-unit-hour) for steady high volume. Prompt and output length drive on-demand cost. Here is how to control it.
AWS Inferentia and Trainium cost: cheaper ML accelerators than GPUs
Inf2 (Inferentia) and Trn1 (Trainium) instances are AWS custom ML accelerators priced per instance-hour, often far cheaper per inference or training step than GPU instances. The catch is model compatibility. Here is when they cut cost.
AWS Timestream cost: writes, tiered storage, and queries scanned
Timestream bills writes per million, storage in a fast memory tier (per GB-hour) and a cheap magnetic tier (per GB-month), and queries per GB scanned. Tuning retention between tiers and scanning less are the levers. Here is the model.
AWS Elastic IP cost: every public IPv4 now costs money
Since February 2024, AWS charges about $0.005 per hour (roughly $3.60/month) for every public IPv4 address, whether attached or idle. Idle Elastic IPs and sprawling public IPs add up fast. Here is what changed and how to cut it.
AWS EBS snapshot cost: incremental storage and the archive tier
EBS snapshots bill about $0.05 per GB-month for changed blocks (they are incremental), or about $0.0125 in the Archive tier for rarely-restored snapshots. Snapshot sprawl from unmanaged schedules is the usual culprit. Here is how to control it.
AWS S3 Intelligent-Tiering cost: automatic tiers, one small fee
Intelligent-Tiering moves objects between access tiers automatically based on usage, with no retrieval fees, for a small monitoring charge per object. It is ideal for unpredictable access patterns. Here is when it saves money and when it does not.
AWS RDS Multi-AZ cost: you pay for the standby you hope never runs
Multi-AZ roughly doubles instance cost by running a standby replica, and mirrors storage, for automatic failover. Multi-AZ cluster deployments add readable standbys. Here is what you pay for high availability and when it is worth it.
AWS SES cost: about ten cents per thousand emails
Simple Email Service charges roughly $0.10 per 1,000 emails sent, plus a small charge for attachments and inbound, and standard data transfer. It is one of the cheapest ways to send email at scale. Here is the breakdown and the few gotchas.
AWS Cognito cost: priced per monthly active user
Cognito bills by monthly active users (MAU) with a free tier, and separately for advanced security features. Cost scales with your user base, not requests. Here is how the MAU model works and how to keep it predictable.
AWS CloudWatch alarms cost: cheap each, expensive in bulk
CloudWatch alarms cost about $0.10 each per month (standard), $0.30 for high-resolution or anomaly-detection, and $0.50 for composite. A few are trivial; thousands generated per-resource across a fleet add up. Here is how to keep it sane.
AWS GuardDuty cost: priced by the volume it analyzes
GuardDuty bills by the data it inspects: CloudTrail events, VPC Flow Logs, DNS logs, and optional S3, EKS, and malware protection. High-volume accounts pay the most. Here is what drives the bill and how to control it.
AWS ElastiCache Serverless cost: pay for data stored and compute used
ElastiCache Serverless bills per GB-hour of data stored and per ElastiCache Processing Unit (ECPU) consumed, scaling to your workload with no nodes to size. It suits spiky caches; steady ones can be cheaper on nodes. Here is how it prices.