The best way to save money on AWS is by commiting to use compute services for a period of 1 to 3 years, here you have several combinations like up front, no upfront or even partial upfront, depends on what is selected here toy might get from 25% to 55% discount on compute costs.
In this link you can find a cool wizard to calculate your savings: AWS compute savings
The other day I got a request from our team leader to check why our AWS expenses had shoot up unexpectedly the last month, after a few minutes revising the previous months billing I figured out that AWS started collecting taxes, cloudwatch has been increasing as we were implementing a better logging system for our apps, and also AWS started charing us $0.005 per IP address hourly starting on february 2024.
One day pretty early in the morning I got a message with an screenshot from the CTO saying:
Any thoughts on how we keep these cleaned up?
A few months earlier we were discussing the need of deploying feature branches environments as a solution to avoid our delivery process getting stuck as we were deploying more than the QA team could handle. We created a feature branches deployments pipeline and it was working great as every important feature was tested isolated from the QA envrionment (No merges until approved by QA), essencialy we stopped having complains about our queue to production getting stuck by defective code or incompleted acceptance criteria.
Prior to work on this company I was able to get four AWS certifications and also participating in a few projects that required knowledge in AWS, but nothing compared with what I was able to achieve during this time.
You might be thinking how I end up collaborating with architecture and infrastructure if I was originally hired to fill a position as a backend engineer, the truth is that I was extremely lucky, there were some managerial changes in the company and after a few months of starting my journey here, a new CTO was introduced to the team, we also were a pretty small team and always needed an extra pair of hands.
Late in 2023, AWS informed our Aurora servers needed to be migrated due to the deprecation of the MySQL Community major version 5.7 and it was recommended to migrate to major version 8.0.
[!cite] AWS Announcement
[!note] Check how companies are not aware of this costs and how this could be impacting your billing: AWS Billing spike due to RDS Extended Support
That day during our stand up the Scrum Master and the CTO assigned to me the task to evaluate the impact of this notification and inmediately I raise my concern about the costs the company will have to pay if we meet the deadline. In the beginning this didn’t see like too much - $0.1 per VCPU -, and I decided to invest that day in putting together all the numbers to make sure we all understand the impact of this notification.