What if half of your AWS spend is wasted on idle servers and forgotten discount plans You might be throwing thousands of shekels down the drain without even realizing it In this post you’ll learn how to hunt down every cost leak and reclaim 50 percent of your budget in weeks
Discover Where Your Money Vanishes
Open your cost dashboard and slice your spend by service tags accounts and regions You want to spot the big hitters that are draining your budget Look for underused instances idle load balancers and unattached volumes These silent budget killers hide in plain sight until you shine a light on them
Rightsize for Real Savings
Many teams overprovision compute “just in case” Downsizing or terminating underutilized EC2 instances and RDS databases can shave off 20 to 30 percent of your bill overnight Don’t stop at one audit Build a simple script or use built‑in recommendations to review utilization weekly Then swap out pricey m5 or c5 instances for t3 or t4 based on actual load
Lock in Discounts That Deliver
Reserved Instances and Savings Plans are your secret weapon Commit to one or three years of steady workloads and grab up to 70 percent off on‑demand rates If flexibility matters lean into Compute Savings Plans which cover EC2 Lambda and Fargate without tying you to specific instance types Even a partial commitment can cut your bill by 25 percent or more
Automate to Avoid Waste
Manual scaling is a luxury you can’t afford Set up auto scaling groups for EC2 and managed services like DynamoDB and ECS Scale out when traffic spikes and scale in when things calm down You only pay for what you use No more paying full price during off‑peak hours
Fine Tune Your Storage Costs
Cold data doesn’t need hot storage Move infrequently accessed objects into archive tiers with lifecycle rules S3 Intelligent‑Tiering can auto‑move data based on usage patterns and save you up to 40 percent Use Glacier or Deep Archive for backups you almost never touch
Maintain Control with Governance
Set monthly budgets and alerts so you never get a surprise bill Build simple guardrails with tagging policies and AWS Config to enforce best practices Hold teams accountable by embedding cost metrics into your OKRs A culture of cost awareness keeps savings alive
Conclusion
Cutting your AWS costs in half is not a myth It’s a repeatable process of discovering waste rightsizing resources locking in discounts automating scale and enforcing governance Start small tackle the biggest leaks first and watch your savings compound over time
Too Long Didn’t Read
- Pinpoint idle and oversized resources by slicing spend with tags and cost explorer
- Commit to Reserved Instances or Savings Plans for up to 70 percent off rates
- Automate scaling and storage tiering to pay only for what you actually use
- Enforce budgets alerts and governance to keep costs under control
