Reducing AWS Costs by 60%: Strategies for 2025
The FinOps Mindset
FinOps (Financial Operations) is the cultural shift where engineering teams take ownership of cloud costs. It's not about spending less; it's about spending efficiently.
"Every resource must have an owner and a tag." If you can't identify who launched an EC2 instance, you can't optimize it.
1. The "Big Three" Cost Killers
Use Spot Instances for Stateless Workloads
Save up to 90%Spot instances are spare AWS capacity. They can be interrupted with a 2-minute warning. Use them for your CI/CD runners, batch processing jobs, and containerized microservices (EKS/ECS) that can gracefully handle restarts.
Compute Savings Plans
Save up to 66-72%Commit to a consistent amount of usage (e.g., $10/hour) for a 1 or 3-year term. Unlike Reserved Instances, Savings Plans apply to any instance family in any region, even including Fargate and Lambda usage.
S3 Intelligent Tiering
Automated SavingsStop guessing access patterns. This storage class automatically moves objects that haven't been accessed for 30 days to the Infrequent Access tier.
resource "aws_s3_bucket" "example" {
bucket = "my-data-bucket"
}
resource "aws_s3_bucket_lifecycle_configuration" "bucket-config" {
bucket = aws_s3_bucket.example.id
rule {
id = "intelligent-tiering"
status = "Enabled"
transition {
days = 0
storage_class = "INTELLIGENT_TIERING"
}
}
}
2. Database Rightsizing Strategy
Databases are often vastly over-provisioned "just in case." Use metrics to right-size them.
| Pattern | Recommendation | Potential Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Unpredictable Spikes | Switch RDS to Aurora Serverless v2 or DynamoDB On-Demand. | Pay for usage, not idle time. |
| Dev/Test Envs | Schedule automatic shutdowns at night (7 PM - 7 AM). | Reduce bill by ~50%. |
Conclusion
Cost optimization is not a project; it's a process. Start by activating Cost Explorer, setting up AWS Budgets for anomaly detection, and purchasing Savings Plans for your baseline load. The goal is to maximize the business value of every dollar spent in the cloud.