10 Ways You're Wasting Money On AWS And What To Do Instead

I have a few clients I’m working with on their AWS accounts at the moment.

100% of them are making at least one of these mistakes and its costing them every month without them knowing it.

The worst part is its super easy to avoid.

There are a lot of opportunities to reduce your monthly cloud bills and this article will help you with at least one and probably more.

Here are the 10 biggest cost mistakes I’ve seen my clients make and how to fix them.

1. Wasting Money on Idle EC2 Instances

EC2 instances sitting idle still cost you money.

Use AWS Cost Explorer Resource Optimization to identify and stop underutilized instances. You can also use AWS Instance Scheduler for automation and AWS Compute Optimizer for instance recommendations.

➡ Fix: Stop or rightsize EC2 instances based on your usage data.

2. Paying for Unused EBS Volumes

Old EBS volumes can pile up and unknowingly cost you.

Use Trusted Advisor to find low-utilization volumes, snapshot them for backup, and then delete the unnecessary ones.

➡ Fix: Set up Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager to automate snapshot creation and deletion.

3. Using Expensive S3 Storage for Rarely Accessed Data

Not all data needs to be in standard S3 storage. S3 Analytics can identify objects that should move to S3 Infrequent Access or S3 Intelligent teiring to cut costs without losing access.

➡ Fix: Use Lifecycle Policies to automate data movement.

4. Keeping Idle RDS and Redshift Instances Running

Unutilized databases are a massive cost black hole. Trusted Advisor can detect RDS instances with no connections for 7 days. Redshift clusters with low CPU utilization should be paused to save costs.

➡ Fix: Stop RDS instances and pause Redshift clusters when they’re not in use.

5. Over-Provisioning DynamoDB Capacity

DynamoDB offers auto scaling and on-demand mode, but many users stick with provisioned capacity, leading to wasted read/write throughput.

➡ Fix: Enable auto scaling or switch to on-demand mode to pay only for what you use.

6. Paying for Idle Load Balancers

Load balancers with less than 100 requests in 7 days are probably unnecessary. Use Trusted Advisor to identify and delete them.

➡ Fix: Review EC2 Data Transfer costs and use CloudFront to reduce outbound data charges.

7. Not Using Spot Instances for Cost Savings

EC2 Spot Instances offer up to 90% savings over on-demand pricing. Workloads like big data, containerized apps, and CI/CD pipelines are ideal for spot instances.

➡ Fix: Use Auto Scaling Groups to combine on-demand and spot instances efficiently.

8. Inefficient EC2 Auto Scaling Configurations

Over-aggressive scaling policies can lead to unnecessary costs. Review your scaling activity logs and optimize thresholds to match actual demand.

➡ Fix: Adjust Auto Scaling policies to reduce minimum instance counts where possible.

9. Missing Out on Reserved Instance Discounts

RIs can cut RDS, Redshift, ElastiCache, and Elasticsearch costs by 42%, but many users don’t use them. AWS Cost Explorer provides RI recommendations based on your actual usage.

➡ Fix: Buy a one year, no upfront RIs after right-sizing your databases.

10. Ignoring Compute Savings Plans

Savings Plans provide flexible discounts (up to 54%) across EC2, Lambda, and Fargate, but they require a commitment.

➡ Fix: Use one year, no upfront Compute Savings Plans to get lower rates without too much constraints.

One Tip To Save Costs

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Curated Videos

1. “Nine Ways to Reduce Your AWS Bill”. AWS Online Tech Talks. https://pages.awscloud.com/Nine-Ways-to-Reduce-Your-AWS-Bill_2020_0008-CMP_OD.html

References

1. “10 things you can do today to reduce AWS costs”. by Roshni Pary. April 6, 2020. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/10-things-you-can-do-today-to-reduce-aws-costs/

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