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

Late in 2023, AWS informed us that our Aurora servers needed to be migrated due to the deprecation of MySQL Community major version 5.7, recommending a migration to major version 8.0.

[!cite] AWS Announcement

[!note] Check how companies are unaware of these costs and how this could be impacting your billing: AWS Billing spike due to RDS Extended Support

That day during our stand-up meeting, the Scrum Master and the CTO assigned me the task of evaluating the impact of this notification. I immediately raised my concern about the costs the company would incur if we didn’t meet the deadline. Initially, it didn’t seem like much - $0.1 per VCPU -, so I decided to invest that day in compiling all the numbers to ensure everyone understood the impact of this notification.

You might be wondering why your AWS expenses for RDS shoot up in the last few months or maybe you already know this is caused by the Amazon RDS Extended Support for Aurora and want to migrate your engine version, if so this post is for you.

Late in 2023, AWS informed Aurora users to migrate the version of the Aurora engines due to the deprecation of the MySQL Community major version 5.7 and it was recommended to migrate to major version 8.0.