EC2 Reserved Instances
- Save costs by purchasing Reserved Instances (1- to 3-year reservation)
- Pay all, in part, or nothing up front (more savings the more you pay up front)
- Some instances can be sold for a fee on the Marketplace
Spot Instances
- “Name your price” purchasing option (save up to 90%)
- Can be interrupted, so plan accordingly (new pause feature for CS and M5)
Low Utilization
- Set CloudWatch alarms to terminate underutilized instances
- Example: 5% CPU utilization for 50 minutes
- Find the right balance between availability and cost
- Example: How much does 1 minute of downtime cost vs. the cost of eliminating that downtime?
Unused Load Balancers
- Remove them
EBS Volumes
- EBS volumes cost money, even when not in use
- Delete unused volumes; take a snapshot if you want to keep the data
- Snapshot storage is cheaper
- Provisioned IOPS cost more
- Make sure you’re not provisioning more than necessary
- Downsize volumes that aren’t anywhere near full capacity
Elastic IP Addresses
- EIPs cost money when not in use — associate them
- Having more than one EIP associated to an instance costs money
- ElPs on stopped instances cost an hourly fee
Idle Amazon RDS DB Instances
- Snapshot unused DB instances, and delete them (0 connections over time)