cost optimization
798 articles on cost optimization — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
DocumentDB cost explained: what you pay for a managed document database
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.
Does a VPC cost money? What is free and what is not
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.
Does IAM cost money? The free service and its paid neighbors
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.
Does Terraform cost money? Open source, Cloud, and what you actually pay
Terraform the open-source tool is free to download and use. HashiCorp offers paid HCP Terraform (formerly Terraform Cloud) tiers for teams. And separately, the infrastructure Terraform provisions costs money. Here is what is free and what is not.
DynamoDB capacity planning cost: on-demand vs provisioned
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.
EventBridge cost explained: what you pay for events and rules
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.
FinOps KPIs that matter: measuring cloud cost the right way
Good FinOps measures efficiency, not just total spend. The KPIs that matter, unit cost, commitment coverage and utilization, waste percentage, forecast accuracy, and allocation coverage, each point to a specific action. Here is how to choose and use them.
Your first AWS bill explained: reading the line items
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.
Forecasting cloud costs: a practical guide to predicting spend
Cloud cost forecasting predicts future spend so you can budget, plan, and catch drift early. Good forecasts combine historical trends, known changes, and unit-based modeling. Here is how to forecast cloud costs accurately and what makes forecasts go wrong.
Amazon FSx cost explained: pricing the managed file systems
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.
GCP billing reports explained: reading your Google Cloud spend
Google Cloud billing reports break spend down by project, service, SKU, and label, with filters and grouping to find what drives cost. Here is how to read GCP billing reports, use SKUs and labels, and export to BigQuery for deeper analysis.
GCP committed use discounts explained: how CUDs cut your bill
Google Cloud committed use discounts (CUDs) cut compute and other costs by roughly 20 to 57 percent in exchange for a one or three year commitment. Resource-based and spend-based CUDs work differently. Here is how CUDs work and when they save the most.
GCP free tier explained: what is actually free on Google Cloud
Google Cloud has two free offerings: a 90-day, roughly 300 dollar credit for new accounts, and an always-free tier with monthly allowances for specific services. Here is what is truly free, where the limits are, and how charges begin.
GCP Region pricing differences: why location changes your bill
Google Cloud prices the same resources differently by Region, sometimes by 20 percent or more, and egress between Regions and to the internet varies too. Here is how GCP Region pricing works and how to pick Regions that balance cost, latency, and compliance.
GCP storage classes cost: Standard, Nearline, Coldline, Archive
Google Cloud Storage has four classes trading storage price against retrieval cost and minimum durations. Standard is cheapest to access, Archive cheapest to store. Here is how the classes are priced and how to pick the right one for each data set.
GitHub Actions minutes cost: what CI/CD really costs you
GitHub Actions bills by the minute for hosted runners, with multipliers for larger and non-Linux runners and per-GB charges for storage and data transfer. Here is how Actions minutes are priced, what the multipliers mean, and how to cut CI costs.
GKE Autopilot vs Standard cost: which Kubernetes mode is cheaper
GKE Standard bills for the nodes you provision; GKE Autopilot bills for the pod resources you request. Autopilot removes node management and idle waste but charges a premium per resource. Here is how the two pricing models compare and when each wins.
Glacier vs Deep Archive cost: which S3 cold tier to choose
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.
Lambda provisioned concurrency cost: paying to kill cold starts
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 vs Fargate cost: which serverless compute is cheaper
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.
Lift and shift vs refactor cost: two paths to the cloud
Lift and shift moves workloads to the cloud as-is for speed, but often carries over-provisioned cost; refactoring for cloud-native services costs more up front but runs cheaper. Here is how to weigh the two.
LLM token cost explained: what you actually pay per call
Large language model APIs bill per token, split between cheaper input tokens and pricier output tokens, and the counts add up fast with long prompts and context. Here is how token pricing works and how to control it.
Log retention cost strategy: keeping logs without the surprise bill
Logs are cheap to write and expensive to keep forever. A retention strategy that tiers, expires, and archives logs by value cuts storage and ingestion cost without losing what you actually need. Here is how to build one.
Model hosting cost compared: API vs self-hosted inference
You can call a hosted model API and pay per token, or run your own model on GPU instances and pay for uptime. Each wins at a different scale. Here is how the two cost models compare and where they cross over.