5 Quick Wins for AWS Cost Optimization: Stop Overpaying for the Cloud
Are you paying more than you should for your AWS infrastructure? Here are five simple, actionable steps you can take today to reduce your monthly cloud bill.
When you first start building on AWS, it's easy to spin up resources and forget about them. Over time, these forgotten resources can inflate your monthly bill. Fortunately, optimizing your AWS costs doesn't require a degree in cloud finance.
Here are five quick wins you can implement right now to trim the fat from your AWS architecture.
1. Set Up AWS Budgets and Billing Alarms
Before you start optimizing, you need visibility. AWS Budgets allows you to set custom budgets that alert you when your costs or usage exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your budgeted amount.
- Action: Go to the AWS Billing Dashboard, navigate to Budgets, and create a zero-spend or custom budget. Attach an email alert so you're notified before a bill gets out of hand.
2. Terminate Unattached EBS Volumes
When you terminate an EC2 instance, the attached Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume is often left behind if the "Delete on Termination" flag wasn't checked. You continue to pay for these orphaned volumes even though they aren't attached to any active compute.
- Action: Go to the EC2 Dashboard, click on Volumes, and filter by the state
Available. Review these volumes—if you don't need the data, take a snapshot just in case, and then delete the volume.
3. Clean Up Unused Elastic IP Addresses
AWS allows you to allocate Elastic IP (EIP) addresses for free—as long as they are attached to a running EC2 instance. However, if you terminate the instance and leave the EIP sitting idle in your account, AWS charges you a small hourly fee for hoarding the IP address.
- Action: Check the Elastic IPs section in your EC2 Dashboard. If you see any EIPs that are not associated with a running instance, release them back to AWS.
4. Automate Start/Stop Times for Non-Production Environments
Development and testing environments rarely need to run 24/7. If your team only works 40 hours a week, leaving a Dev server running for the remaining 128 hours of the week is a massive waste of money.
- Action: Use AWS Instance Scheduler or simple EventBridge rules triggering Lambda functions to automatically shut down non-production EC2 and RDS instances at 6:00 PM and start them back up at 8:00 AM on weekdays.
5. Move Stale Data to S3 Intelligent-Tiering
Amazon S3 is cost-effective, but paying for Standard storage on files you haven't accessed in years adds up. S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves data between frequent and infrequent access tiers based on your changing access patterns, optimizing your storage costs without performance impact or operational overhead.
- Action: Modify the storage class of your existing buckets to Intelligent-Tiering, or set up an S3 Lifecycle Rule to automatically transition older objects.
Conclusion
Cost optimization in the cloud isn't a one-time event; it's a continuous practice. By building these five habits into your routine, you can keep your AWS bill lean and ensure you're only paying for exactly what you need.
Enjoyed reading this content? Let the author know!
Your likes, comments, shares, and saves help creators reach more builders.
Loading recommendations
Loading article