338 articles on aws — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
S3 charges per request, not just per GB stored, so a workload making millions of small GET, PUT, or LIST calls can pay more for requests than for storage. Here is why it happens and how to cut request cost.
S3 offers storage classes from Standard to Glacier Deep Archive, trading storage price against retrieval cost and latency. Matching each object to the right class is a major cost lever. Here is how the classes compare.
SageMaker cost spans notebooks, training jobs, and always-on inference endpoints, and each has its own trap. Idle notebooks and over-provisioned endpoints are the usual culprits. Here is how to optimize each stage.
Spot instances offer steep discounts off on-demand prices for spare capacity that AWS can reclaim with short notice. For fault-tolerant workloads the savings are large; the catch is interruption. Here is how to use spot safely.
SQS, SNS, and EventBridge all move messages between services but price differently, per request, per publish and delivery, and per event with routing. Which is cheapest depends on your fan-out and routing needs. Here is the comparison.
AWS Step Functions bills the Standard workflow type per state transition, so a workflow with many steps or high execution volume can cost more than expected. The Express type prices differently. Here is how to keep orchestration cheap.
T3a instances use AMD processors to deliver the same burstable profile as T3 Intel instances at a lower price. For most general-purpose workloads the swap is a simple, low-risk saving. Here is how they compare.
Most surprise AWS charges come from a short list of usual suspects, data transfer, NAT gateways, idle resources, request fees, and forgotten services. Knowing them turns a mystifying bill into a fixable one. Here is the catalog of surprises.
us-east-1 and us-west-2 are two of AWS's cheapest and most feature-complete regions, with pricing that is close but not identical. Here is how they compare on cost, and what else to weigh beyond the sticker price.
VPC peering is free to set up and charges only for data transfer; Transit Gateway adds hourly attachment and per-GB processing fees but scales connectivity cleanly. Which is cheaper depends on how many VPCs you connect. Here is the detailed comparison.
AWS WAF bills per web ACL, per rule, and per million requests inspected, so cost scales with how many rules you run and how much traffic you protect. Here is how WAF pricing works and how to keep protection affordable.
The AWS free tier covers limited usage for twelve months (and some services always), and when it expires, resources that were free start billing at standard rates. Here is what changes, what to watch, and how to avoid a surprise bill.
Reserved instances save money on steady workloads but lock you into a commitment, so buying at the wrong time or for the wrong capacity wastes the discount. Here is how to decide when a workload is ready to reserve.
A high AWS bill almost always traces to a few dominant drivers, over-provisioned compute, data transfer, idle resources, and unmanaged growth, rather than a mystery. Here is how to find what is driving your bill and bring it down.
us-east-1 (N. Virginia) is AWS's oldest, largest region, and it is consistently at or near the lowest prices and the first to get new services. Here is why it earned that status, and when the cheapest region is not the right choice.
Running Apache Airflow on AWS costs money whether you use managed MWAA or self-host on EC2 or EKS. The bill is driven by environment size, worker scaling, and the compute your tasks actually launch. Here is how to size and control it.
AWS API Gateway offers REST APIs and HTTP APIs at very different prices. HTTP APIs are substantially cheaper per million requests but drop some features. Here is the price gap, the feature tradeoffs, and how to choose.
AWS AppSync (managed GraphQL) and API Gateway (REST and HTTP) are priced differently and suit different workloads. AppSync bills per query and real-time message; API Gateway bills per request. Here is how they compare and when each is cheaper.
AWS security groups are free, there is no charge for creating or using them. But the network resources they protect, and adjacent features like WAF and Network Firewall, do cost money. Here is what is free and what is not.
Some cloud data transfers are free (inbound, same-AZ private traffic) and some are expensive (egress to the internet, cross-region, cross-AZ). Knowing which is which is essential to avoiding surprise bills. Here is the map.
Both Athena and Redshift Spectrum query data in S3 and both charge per terabyte scanned, but their cost models and surrounding infrastructure differ. Here is how they compare and how to make either one cheap.
Aurora Serverless v2 scales database capacity in fine-grained Aurora Capacity Units and bills per ACU-hour. It can save money on variable workloads but cost more on steady ones. Here is how the pricing works and when to use it.
When your AWS bill jumps unexpectedly, a systematic investigation, Cost Explorer, grouping by service and usage type, checking recent changes, finds the cause fast. Here is a step-by-step troubleshooting playbook.
AWS Local Zones place compute and storage closer to end users in metro areas, at prices higher than the parent region. Here is how Local Zones are priced, the data transfer implications, and when the latency is worth the premium.