Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
If you use EC2 in your environment, it’s likely it will be high on your bill. Fortunately there are a lot of steps you can follow to reduce the cost.
Decommissioning
Section titled “Decommissioning”Identify EC2 instances which are no longer required.
Using Compute Optimizer will highlight instances which have low utilisation and therefore could be candidates for
Rightsizing
Section titled “Rightsizing”Ensure that EC2 instances are
Scheduling
Section titled “Scheduling”By stopping instances when they are not in use, you remove the associated run cost.
CPU utilisation
Section titled “CPU utilisation”A more aggressive
Type / generation
Section titled “Type / generation”Using the latest generation of instance type will often save you money. There are times where the same xlarge instance type will
Graviton
Section titled “Graviton”Graviton is AWS’ ARM based CPU which delivers better performance at lower cost. Your application needs to be
AWS claim the processors also use less energy and therefore enjoy a lower carbon footprint.
Graviton instance types are denoted with a ‘g’, i.e. t4g/r6g/m6g.
You cannot simply move to a Graviton processor instance type, but AWS have made it pretty easy with [insert steps].
Elastic IPs (EIP)
Section titled “Elastic IPs (EIP)”EIPs used to be free as long as they were attached to a resource, but that changed in February 2024 when AWS started charging for their usage regardless of their state. Whilst the
Auto scaling
Section titled “Auto scaling”Ideally your application will scale to meet demand so during peak hours you may be running ten instances to handle traffic, but outside of these hours, you may be able to reduce this to four.