Reducing AWS costs without hurting performance
A repeatable pass over compute, storage, and data transfer that removes waste before touching architecture.
Cost work goes wrong when it starts with architecture. Almost every account has a layer of pure waste that can be removed without any performance conversation at all.
Pass one: waste
- Unattached EBS volumes and stale snapshots
- Idle NAT gateways in low-traffic subnets
- Load balancers with zero target groups
- Log groups without retention
Pass two: shape
Match purchase model to workload stability. Steady baseline goes to Savings Plans, spiky batch goes to Spot, and everything else stays on demand until it proves it has a stable shape.
Pass three: architecture
Only after the first two passes does it make sense to discuss caching tiers, storage classes, or moving work to a different runtime. By then you have a clean baseline to measure against.
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