Why it matters
A meaningful amount of savings often comes from fixing the obvious things first. These are hygiene practices that keep costs from drifting up over time, and even though they seem simple, they can have a huge impact on the monthly bill.
Much of what is covered in the service-specific sections of this blog is essentially applying these same practices in more detail for each AWS service.
They’re not complicated, but they require discipline and ownership.
Right-size resources
Many workloads run on instances, databases, and containers that are larger than they need.
Right-sizing is important because:
- You stop paying for idle CPU and memory you never use
- Smaller instances often come with lower storage and networking costs as well
- It forces you to look at real usage data instead of guessing
Use Reserved Instances and Savings Plans
If you have steady, predictable usage, on-demand pricing is usually the most expensive way to pay.
Reserved Instances and Savings Plans are important because:
- They give you significant discounts in exchange for a 1–3 year commitment
- They help stabilize your cost baseline, making forecasting easier
- You can layer them on top of right-sizing for stacked savings
Use Auto Scaling
Most applications don’t need peak capacity 24/7, but many are sized as if they do. Implementing Auto Scaling is not always as simple as flipping a switch—applications need to be designed for horizontal scaling (for example, stateless workloads and shared caches or session stores).
Auto Scaling is important because:
- It adds capacity when traffic increases and removes it when traffic drops
- You avoid over-provisioning for rare spikes, paying closer to actual demand
- It encourages horizontally scalable architectures that are easier to optimize over time
Turn off non-prod when not in use
Development, test, and sandbox environments are often only used during business hours, but they run 24/7.
Turning them off when idle is important because:
- You avoid paying for nights, weekends, and holidays when nobody is using them
- It’s a low-risk change—non-prod can usually tolerate stop/start cycles
- It encourages teams to automate environment management instead of leaving things running forever
Use lifecycle policies for data
Data tends to grow silently over time: logs, metrics, backups, snapshots, and old copies all accumulate.
Lifecycle policies are important because:
- You can automatically move cold data to cheaper storage classes
- You can expire data and snapshots you no longer need for operations or compliance
- They prevent long-term cost creep from “set and forget” logging, backups, and snapshot schedules
Remove unused resources
It’s common to find old snapshots, unattached EBS volumes, idle load balancers, or forgotten test stacks.
Cleaning up unused resources is important because:
- You stop paying for things that deliver zero value
- It reduces operational noise and attack surface
- It reinforces a culture of ownership and accountability for cloud spend
Where to go next
Once these basics are in place, move on to:
- Budgets to catch overspend early
- Consolidated Billing to share discounts across accounts
- Tagging Strategy to understand who and what is driving your costs