cost optimization
798 articles on cost optimization — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
AWS WAF cost explained: the three meters that drive your bill
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 storage account tiers cost: Hot vs Cool vs Cold vs Archive
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 network egress cost explained: ingress is free, everything out costs
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 vs EC2 cost: the crossover is utilization, not the rate
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 vs NLB cost: why they're nearly identical and what actually drives 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.
AKS cost optimization: the control plane is free, the nodes are not
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 vs GKE cost: when serverless beats a node pool
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.
ElastiCache vs MemoryDB cost: when durability is worth paying for
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 cost: is the always-on charge worth it?
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.
MWAA cost: why managed Airflow starts at $350/month
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.
Azure SQL Managed Instance cost: the $1,460/month floor and how to lower it
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: when it actually pays off
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.
Azure Hybrid Benefit explained: up to 55% off Windows and SQL
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.
GCP Committed Use Discounts vs Sustained Use Discounts
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.
EBS gp3 vs io2: when each makes sense
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.
m5 vs m6i vs m7i: cost and price-performance compared
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.
GKE Standard vs Autopilot: which mode for your workload
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.
S3 request fees explained: when they matter more than storage
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.
Right-sizing EC2 instances: the 20/50 rule and full process
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.
Azure VM types compared: B vs D vs E vs F series
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.
CloudWatch Logs cost optimization: cutting the $0.50/GB bill
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.
AWS Free Tier explained: what's free in 2026
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.
DynamoDB on-demand vs provisioned: which mode to choose
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 vs Aurora: cost decision framework
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.