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|  Dhananjaya D R                   @/logs   @/software   @/resume   @/contact |
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My Obsession With AWS Cost Optimisation
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                            A drip of water...
                          c> 
                         <(; 
                          /\


I have been obsessed with cloud cost optimisation recently. It got to the point 
where friends started asking me to audit their AWS accounts. When I looked at 
their billing metrics, I told them that they could cut these costs by 50% 
simply by shutting things off.

Here is what I found (and fixed):

[1] S3 VPC Endpoints: Putting an S3 endpoint in VPC gives any traffic to S3 its
    own internal route, so it's not billed like public traffic.

[2] I hunted down random EC2 machines like a starved animal that were spun up, 
    forgotten, and severely underutilised.

[3] Deleted orphaned EBS volumes and upgraded legacy gp2 volumes to gp3 (which 
    is cheaper and more performant), and cleaned up old snapshots.

[4] I found thousands of KMS keys. Keep in mind, even a disabled key costs you 
    $1/month.

[5] Old AMIs often look for the latest security updates immediately upon 
    spin up. If that traffic is routed via a NAT Gateway, you pay for every 
    gigabyte. I also cleaned up unused AMI snapshots.

[6] I removed unused NAT Gateways, unattached Elastic IPs, and VPC peering 
    connections with no DNS resolution.

It is unfortunate that cost management isn’t something most engineers keep an 
eye on regularly. Spinning up unnecessary resources, failing to clean up, and 
writing inefficient code quickly adds up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per 
month for big companies.

And if you are wondering how much of that $$$ savings ended up in my bank 
account? The answer is none.

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