Cloud Cost Optimization Playbook
A practical, opinionated guide to reducing AWS cloud costs without sacrificing reliability or developer velocity.
Who This Is For
Cloud engineers, DevOps leads, and platform teams who manage AWS infrastructure and want a systematic approach to cost reduction — not just a list of tips.
The Framework
Cost optimization is not a one-time project. It is a cycle:
- Get visibility — Understand where money is going (Cost Explorer, tags, Vantage)
- Right-size — Match resources to actual usage
- Commit — Lock in discounts on predictable baseline usage
- Eliminate — Turn off what nobody uses
- Repeat — Review monthly, catch drift early
Guides
| Guide | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Compute | Pod right-sizing, spot instances, Savings Plans, Karpenter, instance family selection |
| Database | RDS right-sizing, service migration (DocumentDB → MongoDB Atlas), reserved capacity |
| Storage | GP2 → GP3, S3 Intelligent Tiering, EBS cleanup, multipart upload lifecycle |
| Networking | VPC endpoints, NAT Gateway costs, cross-AZ traffic |
| Monitoring | CloudWatch cost management, log levels, open-source alternatives |
Quick Wins
If you are looking for the highest-impact changes with the least effort:
- Delete unused resources — idle load balancers, stopped instances with EBS volumes, old Elasticsearch clusters
- Enable S3 Intelligent Tiering — zero effort, automatic savings on infrequently accessed objects
- Migrate GP2 to GP3 — better performance at lower cost, online migration with no downtime
- Add VPC endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB — gateway endpoints are free and eliminate NAT Gateway data processing charges for those services