7 Ways To Save On Your AWS Bill

These tips help you save your money in the cloud without compromising on performance.

1. Use reserved and spot instances to pay up to 90% less on your EC2 instances if you can commit to some long term usage.
Spot instances are unused capacity on sale.

2. Stop Instances on weekends or at night if they aren't being used.
Downsizing based on traffic pattern and needs also goes a long way to save on EC2 monthly costs.

3. Moving your infrequently used files to S3 storage tiers like IA and Glacier will cost you much less - or you can use Intelligent tiering to let S3 move them dynamically based on your usage patterns.

4. If you use Auto scaling groups, regularly monitor and configure them to make sure you aren't overprovisioning instances.

5. When you delete EC2 instances, attached EBS volumes are not always automatically deleted. Delete these to avoid unnecessary charges.

6. Even if your EBS volumes are deleted, volume snapshots are not deleted and the first snapshot is of the entire volume.
Keeping this and other orphaned snapshots will significantly increase your costs over time. Simply delete them when the instance is deleted.

7. Use AWS's Compute Optimizer. It will give you recommendations on how best to optimize your instances.
If you have auto scaling groups, it will give you recommendations as well on how to provision your instances.

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