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6 Tips To Optimize Your Amazon RDS Costs

6 Tips To Optimize Your Amazon RDS Costs

The key to saving money in your RDS database is to constantly right-size your instances.

Uriel Bitton
December 08, 2024

Reducing and optimizing costs in RDS always starts with visibility and then right-sizing.

Here is a guide recommended by AWS that you can use to refer to, to save on database costs every month.

1. Tag and track resource utilization

Assign tags like DatabaseOwner and AppOwner to every RDS instance so you can gain resource visibility and simplify cost allocation.

Use CloudWatch to monitor CPU, memory and identify underutilized instances

2. Define cost-optimization policies

For read replicas: avoid unnecessary replicas if the primary instance is under 30% CPU andI/O usage. Also downsize replicas with low utilization to smaller instance types.
For unused instances: identify instances with no connections or utilization under 5% over a defined period.
For primary Instances: right-size instances consistently under 30% CPU and I/O utilization. For non-production environments, use a higher threshold of 50%.

3. Optimize Backup and storage costs

Regularly delete outdated manual and automatic snapshots per retention policies
Use general purpose SSD (GP2) for non-I/O intensive workloads.
Monitor and manage burst mode credits on GP2 volumes to prevent performance bottlenecks

4. Evaluate Instance Memory and Type

Memory-intensive workloads often require R* or X* instance families. Downsizing should account for the potential impact on query latency and IOPS requirements.
Match instance types to workload needs. For CPU-heavy tasks, use M* instances; for memory-heavy tasks use R* or X* instances.

5. Educate and Automate

train database and application owners on cost-optimization practices.
Implement automated scripts or processes to monitor metrics and make team members cost-aware.

6. Continuous Improvement

Regularly revisit policies to align with evolving workloads.
Use tools like AWS Instance Scheduler and Trusted Advisor to identify optimization opportunities dynamically.

TLDR

Optimize Amazon RDS costs by tagging resources, tracking utilization, and implementing policies to identify and right-size underutilized read replicas, unused instances, and primary instances. Regularly review backups, storage, and instance types to ensure efficient resource allocation and minimize unnecessary expenses.

Here’s my closing comment:

Being cost-aware is the most important skill you can develop in your cloud infrastructure to reduce and optimize costs.