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.

Compute costs savings

In this link you can find a cool wizard to calculate your savings: AWS compute savings

As our baseline workload is already defined, I proposed to joing the compute savings commitment and after discusing it, we agreed on commiting in 1 year no upfront terms, which translated into a 25% savings for compute. Our expenses looked something like this:

EC2 Expenses ECS Expenses Total
$719.52 $721.51 $1,441.03

Billing detail before Compute Instance Reservation

Setting the commitment is something really easy, you just need to go to Billing > Savings plan > Overview > Purchase a Savings Plan. This comes with an analyzer that let you know what are all of the compute related services you have and let you know what is your current hourly rate, it also calculates what would be the final discount hourly rate and a graph to compare before and after. The commitments are pretty flexible as you can use the reservation for several services.

Applies to EC2 instance usage, AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda service usage, regardless of Region, instance family, size, tenancy, and operating system.

This is an example on how the analyzer looks:

AWS compute savings analyzer

We are actively creating new services that are associated with compute expense, but after setting the commitment for 1 year no upfront we saw a reduction in compute of around 26% or $383.03 monthly which end up being around $4,600 yearly.

Billing detail after Compute Instance Reservation

This type of costs optimization applies to any scale company and it is also a quick win as this is something that can be set in a few minutes using the AWS console, you just need to discuss the commitment term with the board if required.