338 articles on aws — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
Route 53 bills $0.50 per hosted zone per month plus $0.40 per million standard queries, and alias queries to AWS resources are free. Latency and geo routing cost more per query, and health checks add up. Here is where the money goes.
KMS charges $1 per month per customer-managed key and $0.03 per 10,000 API requests. AWS-managed keys are free to hold but you still pay for requests. On a busy service, request volume, not key count, is the bill. Here is how to control it.
Gateway endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB are free and remove that traffic from your NAT gateway entirely. Interface endpoints cost per hour per AZ plus per GB, which can still beat NAT on high-volume paths. Here is how to choose.
CloudFront has no fixed fee, you pay for data transfer out to viewers (tiered by region and volume) and per-request charges. Transfer from AWS origins to CloudFront is free, which is why a CDN often lowers your total bill. Here is the breakdown.
AWS Config bills ~$0.003 per configuration item (recorded on every resource change) plus rule evaluations. The bill is churn × recording scope. Here's how to scope recording so Config stays cheap.
Compute and storage have converged, but data transfer hasn't. Here's the shared structure (ingress free, egress tiered, cross-region charged), where AWS/Azure/GCP diverge, and the universal levers to cut it.
Compute Savings Plans give ~66% off across families and Fargate/Lambda; EC2 Instance Savings Plans give ~72% locked to one family/region. Here's which to pick and how they differ from Reserved Instances.
Custom metrics are $0.30/metric/month, but each metric-name + dimension-value combination is a separate billable metric, so high cardinality explodes the bill. Here's how to control it.
Delete waste, right-size, commit the baseline, use Spot, tier storage, cut egress, then keep it down with a cost gate. A practical, impact-ordered checklist with links to the details for each step.
FSx has four file system types, each billing storage plus throughput. Here's what Lustre, Windows File Server, NetApp ONTAP, and OpenZFS cost, which to use, and how to avoid over-provisioning throughput.
DynamoDB cost is throughput + storage + GSIs + extras. Here's how to cut it: match capacity mode to traffic, prune unused indexes, set TTL, and use Standard-IA for cold tables.
Comparable compute and storage sit in a narrow band across the three clouds. The real differences are egress, the discounts you'll commit to, and managed services. Here's how to compare apples-to-apples.
S3 (~$0.023/GB) is cheapest, EBS (~$0.08) middle, EFS (~$0.30) priciest, but they're not interchangeable. Here's how to match the service to the access pattern and avoid paying 13x by using EFS where S3 would do.
Management events' first copy is free; data events ($0.10/100k) on busy S3/Lambda can hit thousands per month. Here's the cost layers and how to scope data events so CloudTrail stays cheap.
EKS cost is control plane ($73/mo) + worker nodes (the bulk) + EBS + load balancers + NAT + cross-AZ transfer. Here's the full breakdown and where the real savings are, almost all in the nodes.
Kinesis scales down to a single shard with no real floor; MSK runs brokers 24/7 ($400+/month for a 3-broker cluster). Here's the crossover by throughput and the Kafka-ecosystem angle.
Athena bills $5/TB scanned and costs nothing idle; Redshift bills for a provisioned cluster (~$793/month per node) or per RPU. Here's the crossover by query volume and how table design cuts both.
Transit Gateway is $0.05/hour per attachment (~$36.50/month each) + $0.02/GB. Here's why it costs more than peering, when the hub is worth it (~4-6 VPCs), and how to cut it.
AWS Backup bills mostly for backup storage (GB-month) plus restore and cross-region copy. The bill grows from retention creep. Here's how the meters work and how to keep backups from piling up forever.
Standard workflows bill $0.025 per 1,000 state transitions; Express bills per request + duration. For high-volume workflows the gap is 50-100x. Here's which to use and why high-frequency Standard workflows blow up.
Secrets Manager is $0.40/secret/month + API calls; Parameter Store standard tier is free. Here's what the fee actually buys (rotation, cross-account) and the split that cuts a large secrets bill 90%.
Graviton (ARM) instances list ~20% cheaper than x86 with up to 40% better price-performance, across EC2, Lambda, RDS, and more. Here's the discount, where it applies, and how small the migration usually is.
AWS WAF charges $5/month per Web ACL + $1/month per rule + $0.60 per million requests, plus paid add-ons like Bot Control. Here's how the meters stack and how to keep them down.
Fargate costs 15-50% more per vCPU and GB than EC2, but you pay for zero idle capacity. Here's where the crossover actually is, why dense fleets favor EC2, and when Fargate's premium is the cheapest line on the bill.