AWS bills surprise teams every month. Here are the 8 concrete actions that cut cloud spend by 40-60% without touching your application architecture.
Use Cost Explorer's Rightsizing Recommendations — it analyses the last 14 days of CloudWatch CPU and memory metrics across your entire fleet and flags instances running below 40% utilisation. Alternatively, enable AWS Compute Optimizer which uses ML to analyse 14 days of utilisation and recommends specific instance type changes with projected savings.
Compute Savings Plans offer up to 66% discount and apply automatically to any EC2 instance type, region, or OS, plus Lambda and Fargate. EC2 Instance Savings Plans offer up to 72% but lock you to a specific instance family and region. Reserved Instances offer up to 72% but require choosing specific instance type, region, and OS upfront. For most teams, Compute Savings Plans are the better choice — the flexibility to change instance types without losing the discount outweighs the slightly lower maximum discount.
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