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

The other day I got a request from our team leader to check why our AWS expenses had shot up unexpectedly the last month. After a few minutes revising the previous months’ billing, I figured out that AWS started collecting taxes, CloudWatch had been increasing as we were implementing a better logging system for our apps, and also AWS started charging us $0.005 per IP address hourly starting in February 2024.

Prior to working at this company, I earned four AWS certifications and participated in several projects that required AWS knowledge, but nothing compared to what I achieved during my time here.

You might be wondering how I ended up collaborating on architecture and infrastructure, given that I was originally hired as a backend engineer. The truth is, I was extremely lucky. There were managerial changes within the company, and a few months after I started, a new CTO joined the team. We were also a pretty small team and always needed an extra pair of hands.