338 articles on aws — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
The identical EC2 instance, S3 bucket, or RDS database costs different amounts depending on the AWS region. Understanding why, and which regions are cheapest, can meaningfully cut your bill. Here is the full explanation.
AWS Wavelength embeds compute and storage inside telecom 5G networks for ultra-low latency to mobile devices, at a premium over the parent region. Here is how Wavelength is priced, the transfer implications, and when it is worth it.
For most AWS accounts, a short list dominates the bill: compute, data transfer, storage, databases, and managed services. Knowing which drivers matter lets you focus optimization where it pays. Here is the breakdown.
EC2 prices vary by region, and the cheapest regions for a given instance are usually the large US regions. Choosing a low-cost region for latency-tolerant compute is easy savings. Here is how to find and use the cheapest region.
CloudFront bills for data transfer out, requests, and optional features, and the biggest savings come from raising cache hit ratio, choosing the right price class, and using commitments. Here is a complete guide to optimizing CloudFront cost.
CloudWatch can quietly become a large line item through custom metrics, high-cardinality dimensions, verbose logs, and frequent API calls. Here is what drives a CloudWatch surprise bill and how to keep observability cost under control.
Standard reserved instances offer the deepest discount but lock you into an instance family; convertible RIs discount a bit less but let you change instance type. Here is how to choose based on how stable your workload is.
AWS Direct Connect gives a dedicated private link with lower, predictable data-transfer rates but port and setup costs. A Site-to-Site VPN is cheap to start but runs over the internet at standard egress rates. Here is the cost comparison.
Amazon DocumentDB bills for instance hours, storage consumed, I/O operations, and backups, with a separate compute-and-storage model. Understanding each meter, and how I/O can dominate, is key to controlling DocumentDB cost. Here is the breakdown.
The VPC itself is free, and so are subnets, route tables, security groups, and internet gateways. The costs come from what you attach: NAT gateways, VPC endpoints, data transfer, and traffic through certain components. Here is exactly what you pay for.
AWS IAM itself is completely free: users, roles, groups, and policies cost nothing. The confusion comes from adjacent paid services like IAM Identity Center add-ons, Secrets Manager, and certain identity features. Here is what is free and what is not.
DynamoDB cost hinges on capacity mode: on-demand bills per request with no planning, provisioned bills for reserved throughput you must size. Picking the right mode, and sizing provisioned capacity, is the core cost decision. Here is how.
Amazon EventBridge charges mostly per event published, with extras for schema discovery, replay, and cross-Region routing. The default event bus receiving AWS service events is free. Here is how EventBridge pricing works and how to keep it cheap.
The first AWS bill is confusing: dozens of line items, unfamiliar units, and charges for things you did not know were metered. Here is how to read it, which line items matter, and how to avoid the common first-bill surprises.
Amazon FSx offers four managed file systems (Windows, Lustre, NetApp ONTAP, OpenZFS), each priced differently for capacity, throughput, and IOPS. Costs vary widely by type and deployment. Here is how FSx pricing works and how to choose the cheapest fit.
S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, Glacier Instant Retrieval, and Glacier Deep Archive trade storage price against retrieval speed and cost. Deep Archive is the cheapest storage at around a dollar per TB per month. Here is how the cold tiers compare and when to use each.
Provisioned concurrency keeps Lambda instances warm to eliminate cold starts, but you pay for that capacity around the clock whether it runs or not. Here is how the pricing works and when it is worth it.
Lambda charges per request and per GB-second and scales to zero; Fargate charges per vCPU and GB by the second for continuously running tasks. The cheaper option depends entirely on your traffic pattern. Here is how to choose.
NAT gateways charge both an hourly fee and a per-GB data processing fee, so a chatty private subnet can rack up a large bill nobody expected. Here is why it happens and how to cut the cost.
Migrating from a data center to AWS has a one-time project cost and a new ongoing run cost that replaces your capital spend. Understanding both, and how they compare to on-prem, is essential before you commit. Here is the breakdown.
Managed OpenSearch bills for data nodes, storage, and often dedicated master and warm nodes, so a large or over-provisioned cluster gets expensive fast. Here is how to right-size and tier it without losing search performance.
AWS PrivateLink gives private, secure access to services without traversing the public internet, but interface endpoints bill an hourly fee per endpoint per AZ plus a per-GB data processing charge. Here is how the cost works and when it pays off.
X-Ray bills about $5 per million traces recorded and about $0.50 per million traces retrieved or scanned, with a free tier. Sampling is the main lever, since you rarely need every request traced. Here is how the tracing model prices.
DataSync bills about $0.0125 per GB of data copied, plus any underlying storage and transfer at the endpoints. Cost tracks how much you move, so incremental transfers and filters keep it down. Here is the simple model.