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Top 7 Ways to Reduce AWS Costs Without Changing Your Architecture

  • software735
  • Dec 8
  • 3 min read

Updated: Dec 10

Reduce AWS Costs

Reducing AWS bills doesn’t always require redesigning your entire infrastructure. Many companies think they must move to serverless, rebuild microservices, or re-architect their workloads to achieve major savings. But in reality, a large portion of cloud waste comes from misconfigurations, idle resources, and lack of cost governance—not from architecture choices.

If you want fast, impactful savings without touching your workloads, here are the top 7 ways to reduce AWS costs while keeping your architecture exactly as it is.


1. Right-Size Over-Provisioned Compute Resources

Over-provisioning remains the biggest source of cloud waste. Most EC2 instances, RDS databases, and EKS nodes are larger than they need to be. Without re-architecting, you can resize these resources to better match actual usage.

What to do:

  • Use AWS Compute Optimizer recommendations

  • Check CPU, memory, and I/O utilization

  • Downgrade instance types where possible

  • Reduce EBS volume size where utilization is low

This is one of the easiest AWS cost saving tips that delivers instant results.



2. Eliminate Idle and Zombie Resources

Over time, cloud environments accumulate unused assets that silently increase monthly bills. These zombie resources often go unnoticed because they don’t generate alerts—they just sit idle and cost money.

Common offenders:

  • Unattached EBS volumes

  • Idle Elastic IPs

  • Stopped-but-not-terminated EC2 instances

  • Old snapshots

  • Unused load balancers

  • Idle NAT gateways

Removing or cleaning up these items is one of the fastest ways to achieve cloud waste reduction.


3. Use Savings Plans and Reserved Instances (RIs)

Without changing your architecture, you can lock in lower prices for compute resources simply by committing for one or three years. Savings Plans and Reserved Instances offer significant cost reductions.

Benefits:

  • Save 30–72% on EC2, Lambda, and Fargate

  • No architecture changes required

  • Predictable monthly billing

If your workloads run consistently, this is a highly effective way to reduce AWS costs long-term.



4. Optimize Storage Classes and Lifecycle Policies

Many companies store all their data in S3 Standard, even if it’s rarely accessed. By shifting data to cheaper storage classes, you can reduce costs immediately without modifying application code.

Techniques:

  • S3 Intelligent-Tiering for unpredictable access

  • Move old data to Glacier

  • Apply lifecycle rules to delete expired data

  • Compress large logs

Small changes in S3 management can deliver huge savings across data-heavy applications.


Reduce AWS Costs

5. Enable Autoscaling When Possible

Even if you don’t change your workload design, enabling autoscaling can reduce unnecessary compute usage. Many environments run at peak capacity 24/7, even though traffic fluctuates.

Quick actions:

  • Enable EC2 Auto Scaling

  • Use Application Load Balancer metrics

  • Scale to zero for dev/test environments during off-hours

This simple step often cuts 20–40% of costs in dynamic environments.



6. Turn Off Non-Production Resources After Hours

Development, staging, and testing environments typically don’t need to run 24/7. Manually or automatically shutting them down during off-hours can reduce monthly costs significantly.

Options:

  • Use AWS Instance Scheduler

  • Use automation tools like Lambda or CloudWatch

  • Set daily on/off schedules

  • Group resources by tags

This is one of the most underrated AWS cost saving tips, especially for growing teams.


7. Improve Cost Visibility and Alerts

You can’t reduce what you can’t see. Many cost overruns happen simply because organizations lack real-time visibility into spending. Without changing architecture, improving cost monitoring can help you detect waste early.

Recommended tools:

  • AWS Cost Explorer

  • AWS Budgets with alert thresholds

  • KloudID for real-time waste detection

  • CloudWatch for resource-level cost insights

Better visibility leads to faster corrections and prevents nasty end-of-month surprises.


KloudID Can Help

KloudID finds AWS waste, enforces cloud governance, and saves 20–30% on AWS through real-time cost optimization and audit trails. Let us help you cut your CloudWatch and overall AWS costs—starting today.


 
 
 

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