Best practices to optimize your AWS costs

Introduction

Amazon provides many cloud services, with many configuration options for each. While this means they are flexible to meet your needs, it can also make it hard to know if you’re using the best configurations for your needs or if you’re spending more than you need to.

As your needs and usage change over time, you may be left paying for infrastructure or services you no longer use. Even accounting for this and removing unused infrastructure like old and unused EC2 instances can lead to waste if you overlook removing any of the resources it used. Afterward, it can be challenging to spot these unused resources and the costs can add up.

Over time, Amazon introduces new services and configuration options. Sometimes these can be cheaper than their previous offerings, and you could be spending more than necessary even if you initially chose the best options for your requirements.

This guide gives an overview of the best practices to optimize your AWS costs. The major sections are:

  1. Billing Birds Eye View
  2. Instances
  3. Volumes
  4. Snapshots
  5. Load Balancers
  6. Addresses
  7. RDS Instances
  8. S3 Buckets

Billing Birds Eye View

AWS Cost Explorer can display where your costs are going each month. Click here and

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