This year’s AWS Summits are more than a little different. Despite being virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic, AWS is packing these events with lots of content. I’ve had a great time attending virtually, trying out hands-on labs, and sitting in on the technical sessions. As I work primarily with cost management and optimization for cloud compute services, this has been my main interest in attending the conferences. Here are my main takeaways around better managing your AWS cloud costs.

If you have discovered that your application demand changes over time, you’re probably wondering how you can continuously adjust your cloud capacity in accordance to application demand. If you use CloudFormation, then you’re in luck! This article walks through how you can update your template code to automatically implement infrastructure adjustments, periodically.

Today, you probably wouldn’t blink at the idea of involving security in your development process. In fact, “shifting security left” has become so commonplace in the security industry, that there are conferences and job titles dedicated to SecOps (or DevSecOps or SecDevOps *eye roll emoji*). Yet, it wasn’t that long ago that the massive transition to this mindset took place.

Whether it be a tweets about shocking AWS bills or the impact of cloud bills on tech company margins, cloud costs are a hot topic. If you're looking to get up to speed and learn a little more, check out this collection of podcasts, blogs, and articles.

Making sure you don't overspend on AWS is a perennial challenge for many software companies. To help make sure you don't surpass your budget, AWS offers billing alerts, which send you an alert when your costs have reached a certain threshold. This can be a handy way to keep your costs in check, but can take some time to set up and will cost you some extra money.

It is no secret that it is not that hard to accidentally spend a boatload of money on AWS. This Twitter user told the story of his $77,000 mistake with a monkey emoji (because what’s funnier than spending the price of an entry level Tesla by accident.) The scary part is that many of us have been there. If you are not looking at your cloud bill every day, it is easy to let the costs run up quickly, then suffer from bill shock when it arrives a month later.

We’re often asked what are some of the top areas where we see customers overspending? Data transfer costs from misconfigured NAT Gateway definitely tops our list as one of the most common. In this article we’ll walk you through five steps to find which data transfers you’re overspending on and how to you can eliminate those excess charges.

Amazon recently announced the rollout of their new AWS Savings Plans, a new way to reduce your cloud compute costs. These allow you to achieve the discounts associated with their popular Reserved Instances (up to 72% off on-demand pricing) without having to engage in the headache of managing the same. With the new plans, you would commit to a particular hourly spend of your choosing on either a 1 year or 3 year fixed term.

Last week, Amazon announced the end of the reserved instance, commonly known as the “RI”, with the announcement of their new replacement, “AWS Savings Plans”.

If your business depends on AWS cloud services, you’re probably familiar with the experience of having unexpected, hidden charges crop up on your monthly invoice. At times, the AWS cost structure can be quite opaque, making it difficult to accurately gauge in advance the costs of hosting a given application. One of the most common sources of unanticipated AWS charges is the service’s data transfer fees.