Real cost leaks I've found and fixed - with specific numbers, specific changes, and the reasoning behind each one.
It's easy to buy Reserved Instances. Click a button, lock in the discount, move on with your day. Most people do exactly this. And most people end up overpaying.
Read more →A US FinTech was spending almost $3 million a year on AWS. Not unusual, not especially alarming - just the number they'd grown used to.
Read more →A client was spending a lot on IO1 EBS volumes - the high-performance, high-cost storage tier. And reasonably so. Their workload had genuinely needed those IOPS at some point, so someone had provisioned the right storage for the job. The infrastructure decision was correct at the time.
Read more →One of my clients runs a bursty workload on Fargate. The containers sit idle most of the time, then spike to 100% CPU in seconds - so fast that Fargate can't scale quickly enough. By the time additional capacity comes online, the burst is already over. They're paying for containers that are either idle or too late.
Read more →A client was running a couple of Aurora databases on Serverless. It was a reasonable, conservative decision. Serverless scales with demand. You don't have to think about instance sizing. It's the safe choice.
Read more →Aurora I/O Optimized sounds like a no-brainer. Pay a higher compute rate, get unlimited I/O included. For databases with heavy I/O, it saves a fortune. For one of my clients, a single database on Standard had generated I/O costs as high as $30,000 a month.
Read more →Most cost optimization stories are about big, visible resources. Databases, compute instances, storage volumes. Things with their own line items in the bill. Things you can point at.
Read more →AWS charges for data transfer between Availability Zones. Within the same AZ, traffic between your resources is free. Across AZs, it costs money. This isn't a secret - it's right there in the pricing docs. And most teams know about it in theory.
Read more →Most cost optimization projects are long, drawn-out affairs. Months of analysis. Committees. Prioritization meetings. Tickets that sit in a backlog. Changes that need three approvals and a maintenance window.
Read more →A US FinTech company. $3 million a year in AWS spend. Over seven months, I found and plugged $988,000 in annual cost leaks.
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