cost optimization
798 articles on cost optimization — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
GCP Cloud Storage classes cost: Standard vs Nearline vs Coldline vs Archive
GCS classes trade storage price for access price, with minimum durations of 30/90/365 days. Here's the full breakdown and how to match the class to access frequency with lifecycle rules.
SageMaker cost optimization: kill the idle inference endpoint
The classic SageMaker overspend is a real-time endpoint running 24/7 for a model called rarely. Here's how to cut it with Serverless Inference, multi-model endpoints, Managed Spot Training, and auto-stopping notebooks.
Azure SQL Database cost: DTU vs vCore and why vCore unlocks the discounts
DTU bundles compute/storage/IO simply; vCore separates them and unlocks Azure Hybrid Benefit and reserved capacity. Here's which is cheaper for your database and when to switch.
Azure Container Apps vs AKS cost: serverless or a managed cluster?
Container Apps bills per resource-second and scales to zero; AKS bills node VMs 24/7 and gives full Kubernetes. Here's the crossover and when each is the cheaper, simpler choice.
Cloud Functions vs Cloud Run cost: why concurrency tips it
Cloud Functions 2nd gen runs on Cloud Run, so rates converge, but Cloud Run's concurrency lets one instance serve many requests, making it cheaper for request-heavy workloads. Here's how to choose.
MSK vs Kinesis cost: the broker floor that decides it
Kinesis scales down to a single shard with no real floor; MSK runs brokers 24/7 ($400+/month for a 3-broker cluster). Here's the crossover by throughput and the Kafka-ecosystem angle.
Azure Reserved Instances vs Savings Plans: depth vs flexibility
Azure RIs give up to ~72% off a specific VM size; savings plans give up to ~65% across families with full flexibility. Here's which to pick, how they stack with Hybrid Benefit, and why to commit to baseline.
Redshift vs Athena cost: provisioned cluster or pay-per-scan?
Athena bills $5/TB scanned and costs nothing idle; Redshift bills for a provisioned cluster (~$793/month per node) or per RPU. Here's the crossover by query volume and how table design cuts both.
SQS vs SNS vs EventBridge cost: pick by pattern, not price
SQS is $0.40/M, SNS $0.50/M, EventBridge $1.00/M, but they do different jobs. Here's the cost ranking, when EventBridge's premium is worth it, and how to keep messaging cheap at scale.
Transit Gateway cost explained: attachments, data, and vs VPC peering
Transit Gateway is $0.05/hour per attachment (~$36.50/month each) + $0.02/GB. Here's why it costs more than peering, when the hub is worth it (~4-6 VPCs), and how to cut it.
AWS Backup cost explained: retention is the whole bill
AWS Backup bills mostly for backup storage (GB-month) plus restore and cross-region copy. The bill grows from retention creep. Here's how the meters work and how to keep backups from piling up forever.
Azure App Service Plan tiers cost: you pay for the plan, not the app
App Service Plans bill per instance-hour by tier (B1 ~$13, S1 ~$70, P1v3 ~$120+/mo) times instances. Apps share a plan for free. Here's how to pick the tier and why consolidating apps is the big saving.
Azure Front Door vs CDN cost: caching or full app delivery?
Azure CDN is pure caching billed per GB egress with no base fee; Front Door adds load balancing and WAF for a monthly base plus requests. Here's which to use and why cache hit ratio drives the bill.
GCP persistent disk types cost: pd-standard vs balanced vs ssd
Persistent disks bill per provisioned GB-month by type: pd-standard ~$0.04, pd-balanced ~$0.10, pd-ssd ~$0.17. Here's which to use, why you pay for provisioned size, and how to stop over-paying for SSD.
GCP Spot VMs: 60-91% off if you design for preemption
Spot VMs run 60-91% below on-demand for the same machine type, preemptible at any time. Here's what belongs on Spot, how it differs from preemptible, Spot GKE pools, and how to design for preemption.
Step Functions cost: Standard vs Express and the 100x difference
Standard workflows bill $0.025 per 1,000 state transitions; Express bills per request + duration. For high-volume workflows the gap is 50-100x. Here's which to use and why high-frequency Standard workflows blow up.
Azure Functions cost: Consumption vs Premium plan
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.
Cloud SQL vs AlloyDB cost: when the faster database is also cheaper
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 vs Parameter Store cost: stop paying $0.40 for static secrets
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%.
Aurora Serverless v2 cost: what an ACU really costs you
Aurora Serverless v2 bills per ACU-hour (~$0.12) scaling in 0.5-ACU steps, with a ~$44/month floor unless you enable scale-to-zero. Here's when it beats provisioned Aurora and when it doesn't.
OpenSearch cost optimization: shrink the always-on cluster
OpenSearch bills data-node hours + EBS + master nodes 24/7, so a small cluster is $700+/month. Here's how to cut it with UltraWarm tiering, Graviton nodes, gp3, lifecycle management, and Reserved Instances.
Azure Cosmos DB RU cost optimization: stop over-provisioning throughput
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 cost: on-demand vs slots, and how to stop scanning terabytes
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.
AWS Graviton migration: where the ~20% savings actually come from
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.