You might be thinking, who deploys a database in a public subnet? Even worse, it was deployed in the AWS default public subnet with publicly accessible enabled. This is what happens when services are deployed just because, without thinking about the implementation, but only about business requirements.

At first, it was a bit complex to simply change the publicly accessible setting to disabled as there were a few external data analytics tools that were pulling information from the database every few hours. The first time I tried to do so, I ended up in a call with the CTO and the Data Analytics team asking me why I disabled the public access. Simple answer - Security.

In the past, we were using the VPN solution from AWS, and even though the per-hour cost seems cheap, the truth is the costs scale quickly when the whole team needs to be connected. We were a small team.

At some point, I was investigating a spike in billing, and I marked moving from the AWS VPN solution to OpenVPN as a possible improvement.

AWS VPN costs:

Cost savings is a pretty important part of working with AWS. Knowing your business plan helps you plan in advance and take advantage of the reserved instances plan from AWS. In a previous post, we discussed the power of reserved instances for compute services, and this case is no different. We will see an example of how a commitment can help to reduce your database expenses.

Although this is not the only way to reduce database costs, it is a quick and effective way to achieve it. In a few steps, you will be able to set it up, and it will be running the next day. To reserve your instances, go to RDS > Reserved Instances > Purchase Reserved DB Instance. This is an example of how the reserved instances look after purchase:

At some point in 2023, we were discussing costs and pagespeed. I quickly pointed out that the slow performance and spike in bandwidth costs were caused by the usage of .gif images. At first, the team was reluctant, but a few days later, I came up with a report provided by the Amazon S3 service, where you can save an access log of the hosted files and later process it using Amazon Athena.

The best way to save money on AWS is by committing to use compute services for a period of 1 to 3 years. There are several options, such as upfront, no upfront, or even partial upfront. Depending on the option selected, you 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