Amazon Web Services For Dummies

Chapter 11

Managing AWS Costs

In This Chapter

Digging deeper into the complexities of AWS costs

Keeping track of AWS costs and utilization

Figuring out how to better manage your AWS costs

This chapter addresses two interrelated and vital issues for AWS users:

How to ensure that your AWS applications operate efficiently and effectively

How to best manage your AWS costs

Amazon is justly famous for its ability to run AWS at scale, its effective use of automation, and its track record in keeping costs extra low. However, Amazon’s ability to run AWS efficiently and with low costs doesn’t automatically mean that the resources you run in AWS are efficient and inexpensive.

In fact, using AWS inefficiently isn’t difficult — because you can easily obtain AWS resources, there’s a danger that you may end up using AWS less efficiently than on-premise computing resources. You may think, “Hey, it’s easy to launch a server,” believing that it costs only $.06 per hour and forgetting (or not bothering) ...