Got hit with a cloud cost bomb — any optimization tips?
I'm developing at a startup, and our AWS costs suddenly tripled. After looking into it, I found that development servers were left running overnight and unnecessary logs were piling up in S3. I'm also looking into Reserved Instances and Savings Plans, but I'd appreciate any practical cloud cost optimization tips that have worked for you in the field.
5 answers
I had a similar experience, and what worked best for me was Auto Scaling and scheduling. I created a tag-based scheduler using Lambda to automatically shut down development servers outside of business hours, which cut costs in half. For S3, setting up a lifecycle policy to automatically move logs older than 30 days to Glacier is a good idea.
RI or Savings Plans are definitely helpful in the long run, but in the short term, start by identifying the causes with Trusted Advisor or Cost Explorer. I found that I had more unnecessary EBS snapshots and unused Elastic IPs than I expected. I also recommend enforcing tags to track costs by team.
Are you using t-series instances on your dev server? If burst credits run out, costs can suddenly spike. I migrated to Graviton-based instances and got similar performance with about 20% cost reduction. For S3 logs, try switching to S3 Intelligent-Tiering.
We actively used Spot Instances in our development/test environments. For workloads that can handle interruptions, costs were reduced by 60–90%. And setting up AWS Budgets to send alerts when thresholds are exceeded is a fundamental practice. A sudden 3x spike—could it have been unexpected traffic?
I feel youㅠ I also had a mental breakdown after getting hit with a cost bomb at first. Making cost tags mandatory for all resources was the first step. Then, after running Compute Optimizer, I found that many instance types were oversized. For RIs, buying them with a 1-year upfront payment gives a big discount, so try applying them to stable workloads first.