756 articles on cost optimization — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
Right-sizing cuts steady-state EC2 spend 20-40% in one pass. The 20/50 rule (average under 20%, peak under 50%) finds candidates. Here's the full pipeline: gather metrics, decide size, validate against periodic peaks, deploy in waves with monitoring.
B-series is burstable. D-series is general. E-series is memory-optimized. F-series is compute-optimized. Family selection drives the bill more than size. Here's the per-vCPU and per-GB pricing math, the decision flow, and the workloads each family wins on.
Ingestion at $0.50/GB dominates CloudWatch Logs bills. Source-side filtering, structured logging, IA tier, and S3 migration for high-volume groups typically cut the bill 50-80%. Here's the full breakdown and migration playbook.
Three categories of AWS Free Tier (12-months-free, always-free, trial offers) with the actual limits for each service. What stays free forever, what expires, what surprises new accounts.
On-demand bills per request, provisioned bills per capacity-hour. The break-even is around 25% utilization. Here's the actual math, the decision framework, and how to set up auto-scaling and Reserved Capacity for the lowest steady-state cost.
RDS is cheaper per instance hour; Aurora has more efficient storage and built-in replicas. Here's when each one wins, including Aurora I/O Optimized, Aurora Serverless v2, and Reserved Capacity options.
Six S3 storage classes spanning 99x in per-GB price. Here's when Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, Standard-IA, One Zone-IA, Glacier Instant Retrieval, Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and Deep Archive each make sense, with lifecycle policy patterns.
The most opaque part of the AWS bill, broken down. Internet egress, cross-region, cross-AZ, NAT processing, CloudFront, VPC endpoints. The five biggest cost surprises and how to fix them.
Compute Savings Plans, EC2 Instance Savings Plans, Standard and Convertible Reserved Instances. The actual discount math, what each one covers, and a decision framework for which commitment to buy.
Spot instances offer 50-90% discounts but can be reclaimed with 2 minutes notice. Here's when they're worth it, how to handle interruptions gracefully, and how to combine Spot with Savings Plans for the lowest total cost.
NAT Gateway is the second-most-expensive AWS resource for many production workloads. Here's how to cut its cost by 60-90% using free VPC Gateway Endpoints, paid Interface Endpoints, and NAT instances.
gp3 is 20% cheaper than gp2 with better baseline performance. The migration is in-place with no downtime. Here's exactly when it saves money, when it doesn't, and how to migrate safely at scale.