756 articles on cost optimization — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
Consumption bills per execution and scales to zero; Premium bills ~$150/month per always-on instance for no cold starts and VNet. Here's the crossover and the min-instances trap.
AlloyDB costs more per vCPU than Cloud SQL but is much faster for analytical workloads, so it can need less compute for the same performance. Here's how each bills and which to pick.
Secrets Manager is $0.40/secret/month + API calls; Parameter Store standard tier is free. Here's what the fee actually buys (rotation, cross-account) and the split that cuts a large secrets bill 90%.
Cosmos DB bills by provisioned RU/s (~$0.008 per 100 RU/s-hour) times region count. Over-provisioned throughput and needless multi-region writes are the big overspends. Here's how to right-size and which throughput model to pick.
BigQuery on-demand bills ~$6.25/TB scanned; capacity bills for slots. Here's which model is cheaper for your query volume, and why partitioning and never SELECT * is the biggest saving on either.
Graviton (ARM) instances list ~20% cheaper than x86 with up to 40% better price-performance, across EC2, Lambda, RDS, and more. Here's the discount, where it applies, and how small the migration usually is.
AWS WAF charges $5/month per Web ACL + $1/month per rule + $0.60 per million requests, plus paid add-ons like Bot Control. Here's how the meters stack and how to keep them down.
Azure Blob tiers trade storage price for access price, and each cold tier adds a retention penalty. Here's the full picture, storage rates, access costs, minimum retention, and redundancy, and how to pick the right tier.
GCP charges for egress to the internet, between regions, and even between zones, but not ingress or same-zone traffic. Here's the egress map, the three patterns that drive the bill, and how to cut it.
Fargate costs 15-50% more per vCPU and GB than EC2, but you pay for zero idle capacity. Here's where the crossover actually is, why dense fleets favor EC2, and when Fargate's premium is the cheapest line on the bill.
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.
The AKS control plane is free (or ~$73/month for the SLA tier), but worker node VMs are the real bill. Here's how to cut AKS cost with the autoscaler, Spot node pools, right-sizing, reservations, and scale-to-zero.
Cloud Run bills per request-second and scales to zero; GKE bills for nodes 24/7. The cheaper option comes down to utilization. Here's the crossover, the min-instances trap, and where Autopilot fits.
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.
SQL Managed Instance has a 4-vCore minimum, so even an idle instance starts around $1,460/month on General Purpose. Here's the full pricing breakdown, the Business Critical premium, and the four levers that actually cut the bill.
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.
AHUB lets organizations with Windows Server or SQL Server licenses (with Software Assurance) save up to 40% on Windows VMs and 55% on SQL workloads. Stacks with Reserved Instances for 70-80% total savings.
SUDs are automatic (30% off steady workloads). CUDs require commitment (25-55% off). They don't stack. Here's the math, the break-even, and the optimal strategy: 3-year flexible CUDs on baseline, SUDs above, Spot for elastic.
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.
Autopilot bills per-pod (vCPU, memory, ephemeral storage). Standard bills per-node. The break-even is around 50-55% node utilization. Here's the actual pricing math with n2-standard-4 nodes, when each mode wins, and how to migrate without surprises.
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.