Cutting AWS cost without cutting reliability: 7 patterns

Introduction

AWS bills can grow silently until they become a significant line item. Here are seven patterns we've used to cut costs by 30-60% without impacting reliability.

The Patterns

1. Right-Size Your Instances Use AWS Compute Optimizer and CloudWatch metrics to identify over-provisioned EC2 instances and RDS databases.

2. Leverage Spot Instances For fault-tolerant workloads, Spot Instances can reduce compute costs by up to 90%.

3. Implement Auto-Scaling Scale down during low-traffic periods. There's no reason to run at peak capacity 24/7.

4. Use S3 Intelligent-Tiering Let S3 automatically move infrequently accessed data to cheaper storage classes.

5. Optimize Data Transfer Minimize cross-AZ and cross-region data transfer. Use CloudFront for edge caching.

6. Review Your Architecture Monthly Set a recurring calendar reminder to review your AWS bill and identify cost anomalies.

7. Tag Everything Implement a rigorous tagging strategy. You can't optimize what you can't measure.