756 articles on cost optimization — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
T-family burstable instances (t3, t4g) are the cheapest EC2 option for low-average-CPU workloads, using a CPU credit system. Understand credits and unlimited mode or you will get throttled or hit with surprise charges. Here is how they cost out.
Dedicated Hosts give you a whole physical server, needed for BYOL licensing and hard isolation, but priced per host regardless of how full it is. Regular instances (and dedicated instances) are cheaper for almost everything else. Here is the cost tradeoff.
EC2 offers dozens of instance families (general purpose, compute, memory, storage, and accelerated) each tuned to a resource profile. Picking the right family for your workload is the first and biggest cost lever. Here is how they map.
An EC2 instance's price combines family and size, region, purchase model (on-demand, Spot, or commitment), operating system licensing, and attached resources. Understanding each component is how you control the largest line on most AWS bills. Here is the full breakdown.
EBS is block storage attached to one instance; EFS is a shared file system many instances mount at once. EFS costs more per GB but removes provisioning and scaling overhead. Here is how to choose on cost and fit.
Data egress (traffic leaving AWS to the internet, and between regions and AZs) is one of the most surprising and controllable line items. This checklist walks through the highest-impact ways to cut it, from CDN caching to architecture.
On EKS you can run pods on EC2 nodes you manage or on Fargate serverless capacity. Fargate removes node management and bills per pod, EC2 nodes are cheaper per unit but require you to run and pack them. Here is the cost tradeoff.
ElastiCache (Redis and Memcached) is priced per node by instance type, so node sizing and count drive the bill. Oversized memory, too many replicas, and the wrong node family are the common overspends. Here is how to size for cost.
EMR clusters combine EC2 compute, an EMR service fee, and storage, and they are easy to overspend on with idle clusters, on-demand core nodes, and oversized fleets. Here are the highest-impact levers to cut EMR cost.
GPU instances are the most expensive compute you can rent, from a few dollars an hour for inference cards to tens of dollars an hour for training clusters. Understanding what drives the price, and how to cut it, keeps GPU bills sane. Here is the breakdown.
AWS Graviton (ARM) instances typically cost about 20 percent less than comparable x86 instances while often delivering better performance per dollar. For most workloads the switch is nearly free. Here is what Graviton saves and how to adopt it.
The AWS charges that blow up bills are rarely the compute you planned for, they are data transfer, NAT gateways, idle resources, cross-AZ traffic, and forgotten snapshots. Here is a field guide to the hidden costs and how to keep them small.
A NAT gateway costs about 32 to 45 dollars a month plus per-GB processing, and the naive high-availability setup runs one per availability zone. Knowing when you need that redundancy and when one gateway is fine saves real money. Here is the tradeoff.
AWS savings plans discount compute up to about 72 percent versus on-demand in exchange for a one or three year hourly-spend commitment. How much you actually save depends on term, payment, and coverage. Here is the real math.
A managed Kubernetes cluster costs more than the control plane fee, the real bill is worker nodes, load balancers, storage, and networking. A small production cluster often runs a few hundred dollars a month and up. Here is where the money goes.
A managed Postgres database on AWS costs the instance, the storage, the backups, and the data transfer, from around 15 dollars a month for a tiny dev instance to hundreds for production. Here is what drives RDS and Aurora Postgres pricing and how to keep it lean.
A typical SaaS backend on AWS combines compute, a database, load balancing, storage, caching, and networking. An early-stage backend can run a few hundred dollars a month, scaling with users. Here is how the pieces add up and where to save.
A static website hosted on S3 and CloudFront, or a static host, costs almost nothing at low traffic, often pennies to a few dollars a month, with data transfer and requests the only real meters. Here is the breakdown and where costs can grow.
Hosting an API can cost almost nothing at low volume with serverless, or a predictable monthly amount on a small server, and the crossover depends entirely on request volume. Here is how to estimate API hosting cost and pick the cheaper model.
Running a website on AWS spans a huge range: a static site costs pennies, a small dynamic site tens of dollars, and a high-traffic app hundreds or thousands a month. The cost depends on whether it is static, dynamic, and how much traffic it serves. Here is the map.
AWS Cost Explorer is the built-in tool for understanding your bill, but its default view hides more than it shows. Grouping by service, filtering by tag, and switching to amortized cost turns it from a total into an explanation. Here is how to read it.
Cost per 1000 inference requests is the unit metric that tells you whether serving a model is economical. It ties GPU or serverless cost to actual usage, and it is the number to optimize as you scale. Here is how to compute and reduce it.
Traffic between availability zones inside the same region is not free. At roughly a cent per GB in each direction, cross-AZ transfer quietly adds up for chatty microservices, replicated databases, and Kafka clusters. Here is how it is billed and how to cut it.
CloudWatch has a free tier, but logs, custom metrics, dashboards, and high-resolution alarms all cost money, and log ingestion in particular can quietly rival compute spend. Here is what is free, what is not, and how to keep monitoring cheap.