338 articles on aws — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
ALB and NLB both cost ~$16.43/month to exist plus LCU/NLCU usage at ~$0.006-0.008 per unit-hour. The price difference is small, the real lever is the LCU dimension your traffic stresses and how many balancers you run.
MemoryDB costs more than ElastiCache for the same node type and adds a per-GB data-written charge ElastiCache doesn't have. Here's the price difference, the durability you're buying, and when each is the right call.
RDS Proxy bills per vCPU of the database it fronts, continuously, whether or not connections flow. Here's how the charge works, when it pays for itself, and when it's overhead you can skip.
Amazon MWAA bills a continuous base environment fee with no scale-to-zero, so even an idle environment costs ~$350/month. Here's the cost breakdown, why the floor exists, and how to keep it down.
Aurora I/O Optimized eliminates per-I/O charges but adds ~30% to instance/storage rates. The break-even is around 25% I/O share of total cost. Here's the math, when to switch, and how to apply it in Terraform.
The standard 5 tags every resource should have, the activation gotcha that hides historical data, enforcement via Terraform default_tags and Tag Policies, and the anti-patterns to avoid.
Lambda wins for sporadic and event-driven workloads. Containers win for steady high-volume traffic. The crossover is around 2-3M requests/day for typical APIs. Here's the math, the workload archetypes, and a decision framework.
For 95% of production workloads, gp3 is the right choice (cheaper, performant enough). Use io2 only for over 16K IOPS sustained, 99.999% durability, or Multi-Attach. Here's the pricing math and the migration playbook.
Hourly rates, performance per dollar, and migration paths for AWS general-purpose EC2 families. When to migrate to m7i, when to skip straight to Graviton m7g, and when older families still make sense.
Lambda is the most mis-estimated AWS service. Here's why cost tools show $0 by default, what data to feed them for accurate numbers, and the four optimization levers that actually move the bill.
PUT is $0.005/1K. GET is $0.0004/1K. For high-frequency small-object workloads, request fees can exceed storage fees by 100x. Here's the full request pricing matrix across all storage classes, when fees dominate, and the architectural patterns that keep them low.
Right-sizing cuts steady-state EC2 spend 20-40% in one pass. The 20/50 rule (average under 20%, peak under 50%) finds candidates. Here's the full pipeline: gather metrics, decide size, validate against periodic peaks, deploy in waves with monitoring.
Ingestion at $0.50/GB dominates CloudWatch Logs bills. Source-side filtering, structured logging, IA tier, and S3 migration for high-volume groups typically cut the bill 50-80%. Here's the full breakdown and migration playbook.
Three categories of AWS Free Tier (12-months-free, always-free, trial offers) with the actual limits for each service. What stays free forever, what expires, what surprises new accounts.
On-demand bills per request, provisioned bills per capacity-hour. The break-even is around 25% utilization. Here's the actual math, the decision framework, and how to set up auto-scaling and Reserved Capacity for the lowest steady-state cost.
RDS is cheaper per instance hour; Aurora has more efficient storage and built-in replicas. Here's when each one wins, including Aurora I/O Optimized, Aurora Serverless v2, and Reserved Capacity options.
Cold starts are mostly a latency problem, not a cost problem (except for Java). Here's when they matter, what each runtime's typical cold start looks like, and when Provisioned Concurrency or SnapStart pay for themselves.
Six S3 storage classes spanning 99x in per-GB price. Here's when Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, Standard-IA, One Zone-IA, Glacier Instant Retrieval, Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and Deep Archive each make sense, with lifecycle policy patterns.
The most opaque part of the AWS bill, broken down. Internet egress, cross-region, cross-AZ, NAT processing, CloudFront, VPC endpoints. The five biggest cost surprises and how to fix them.
The honest cost comparison between EKS and ECS, including control plane fees, Fargate vs EC2 trade-offs, and when each platform makes financial sense. With concrete numbers from a 10-service production fleet.
Compute Savings Plans, EC2 Instance Savings Plans, Standard and Convertible Reserved Instances. The actual discount math, what each one covers, and a decision framework for which commitment to buy.
Spot instances offer 50-90% discounts but can be reclaimed with 2 minutes notice. Here's when they're worth it, how to handle interruptions gracefully, and how to combine Spot with Savings Plans for the lowest total cost.
How to estimate the monthly cost of a CloudFormation template before deploying. SAM templates, CDK output, nested stacks, and the patterns that work for migrating an existing CloudFormation workflow.
NAT Gateway is the second-most-expensive AWS resource for many production workloads. Here's how to cut its cost by 60-90% using free VPC Gateway Endpoints, paid Interface Endpoints, and NAT instances.