Five ways we cut AWS bills without cutting corners
Most AWS bills carry more waste than teams expect. Here are the levers we pull first on a cost review — right-sizing, storage tiers, savings plans, and more.
Almost every AWS account we audit is paying for capacity it doesn't use. The good news: cost optimization rarely means degrading the product. It usually means matching what you pay for to what you actually run. Here's where we start.
1. Right-size compute
Instances get provisioned for peak-day guesses and never revisited. We look at real CloudWatch utilization and move workloads to the right instance family and size — often Graviton for a straight price-performance win.
2. Buy the commitment you already have
If a baseline of compute runs continuously, on-demand pricing is a tax on that baseline. Savings Plans and Reserved Instances reduce it substantially with no code change — the trick is committing only to the steady-state, not the spikes.
3. Tier and expire storage
- Move cold S3 data to Infrequent Access or Glacier with lifecycle rules.
- Delete unattached EBS volumes and old snapshots.
- Turn on S3 storage-class analysis so tiering is data-driven.
4. Kill idle and orphaned resources
Dev environments running overnight, load balancers with no targets, NAT gateways in empty subnets. Individually small, collectively a real line item. We tag everything and schedule non-prod to shut down off-hours.
5. Make cost visible
You can't manage what you can't see. We set up cost allocation tags, budgets, and anomaly alerts so the next surprise bill becomes a Slack message before it becomes a month-end shock.
A structured cost review tends to surface most of this at once, simply because nobody had looked at it together before.