AWS Cost Optimization Guide

AWS is powerful. It's flexible, scalable, and widely adopted by startups and enterprises alike. But if you’ve ever been surprised by your monthly bill, you’re not alone.

While AWS follows a pay-as-you-go model, costs can grow quickly without proper planning. Here's a concise guide to help you optimize your AWS spending without impacting performance.

Understand AWS Pricing Basics

AWS charges based on resource consumption—compute, storage, bandwidth, API calls, and more. The three most common compute pricing models are:

• On-Demand – Pay for what you use, great for short-term or unpredictable workloads.

• Reserved Instances – Commit to a 1- or 3-year term and save up to 75%.

• Spot Instances – Bid for unused EC2 capacity and save up to 90% (great for batch jobs or CI tasks).

Actionable Cost Optimization Tips

1. Right-size your instances
Audit your instance usage. Use AWS Trusted Advisor or CloudWatch metrics to find underutilized resources and scale them down.

2. Leverage Auto Scaling
Automatically increase or reduce compute capacity based on real-time traffic.

3. Use the right storage class
Move infrequently accessed data to S3 Intelligent-Tiering or Glacier to lower storage costs.

4. Monitor and alert
Enable AWS Budgets, Cost Explorer, and Cost & Usage Reports to stay on top of your cloud spend.

5. Consolidate accounts
Use consolidated billing to unlock volume discounts across departments or projects.

6. Optimize data transfers
Use CloudFront and avoid inter-region data movement where possible.

Whether you're managing infrastructure or building applications, cost-efficiency is key to long-term success in the cloud.

Read the full blog on AWS Pricing Optimization and Cost Management by Teleglobal International