The Top 10 Native AWS Services To Help You Reduce Your Cloud Costs

AWS offers a powerful array of built-in tools and services (many of them free) that help you monitor, analyze, and cut cloud expenses without compromising performance.

Here are 10 native AWS tools every cost-conscious developer or architect should know:

1. Amazon CloudWatch

Visibility is the first step to savings.

CloudWatch lets you track metrics, logs, and set alarms. You can automatically take action. For example, receive an alert if an EC2 instance’s CPU stays below 20%, then investigate and downsize or terminate it.

2. AWS Cost Explorer

Visualize your cloud spend, track usage patterns, forecast future costs, and get recommendations on Reserved Instances.

It’s your dashboard for understanding and projecting AWS expenses.

3. AWS Trusted Advisor

This tool audits your account and highlights cost-saving opportunities like underutilized EC2s, idle load balancers, unused EBS volumes, and more.

4. AWS Budgets

Set custom thresholds on usage or spend.

Whether you want to cap total monthly costs or set budgets for specific services or accounts, AWS Budgets alerts you before things spiral out of control.

5. Amazon S3 Analytics & Storage Lens

These give deep insights into your S3 storage behavior.

With recommendations on tiering and best practices, you can move rarely accessed data to cheaper storage classes, saving money without manual tracking.

6. Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering

You can let AWS handle the storage tiering for you.

This feature automatically moves your data between frequent and infrequent access tiers, ensuring you only pay for what you use.

7. AWS Auto Scaling

Scale up when needed and scale down when you don’t.

Auto Scaling maintains performance while cutting costs by dynamically adjusting resources based on load.

8. AWS Cost and Usage Report

CUR gives you a granular breakdown of your usage and costs; hourly, daily, or monthly.

You can filter by tags, services, or accounts and store the data in S3 for deeper analysis.

9. AWS Compute Optimizer

Using machine learning, this service recommends right-sized resources for EC2, EBS, and even Lambda.

It’s ideal for spotting over-provisioned infrastructure you might have overlooked.

10. AWS Instance Scheduler

Turn off instances when you don’t need them. Instances like non-prod environments that run during nights and weekends should be scaled down or turned off.

It’s a simple tool with potentially massive savings.

💡Here’s the takeaway:

Before using another SaaS product to reduce cloud costs, check if you’re using the free, native tools AWS already provides.

With just a few adjustments and the right insights, you can make dramatic reductions in your monthly cloud bill.

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References & Further Reading

1. “8 AWS Cloud Cost Optimization Strategies and Tools”. Stormit Blog. https://www.stormit.cloud/blog/cloud-cost-optimization-strategies-and-tools/

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