Right-size your compute
Right-size, Graviton and idle instances: match spend to what you actually run.
Lessons in this path
- 1 Cost AWS
Migrate EC2 to Graviton (ARM)
Up to 40% better price-performance on ARM — surfaced by Cost Optimization Hub as a recommendation. Validate compatibility, then ride the migration loop.
18 min - 2 Cost AWS
Migrate RDS to Graviton (ARM)
db.m6g/r6g instances deliver ~20% better price-performance than x86 with zero application changes — apply the change in a maintenance window.
16 min - 3 Cost AWS
Right-size EC2 instance
Match instance types to actual workload — stop overpaying for unused capacity.
15 min - 4 Cost AWS
Reclaim idle EC2 instances
Find EC2 instances that are running but doing nothing — stop or terminate them before they keep billing.
14 min - 5 Cost AWS
Upgrade EC2 instances to the newest generation
Each new EC2 generation is cheaper per vCPU and ~10-20% faster — Cost Optimization Hub surfaces the no-downside swaps. Apply them.
14 min - 6 Cost AWS
Clean up stopped EC2 instances with attached EBS
A stopped instance costs nothing, but its attached EBS volumes keep billing every hour — find them and decide before the bill compounds.
12 min - 7 Compliance AWS
Remove long-stopped EC2 instances
Security Hub EC2.4 — instances stopped for >30 days are usually abandoned. They keep EBS billing and AMIs/snapshots stale.
11 min - 8 Cost AWS
Stop or delete idle RDS databases
Multi-AZ db.m5.large with 0.3 average connections is paying for nothing — find the idle databases and choose stop, snapshot+delete, or Aurora Serverless.
16 min - 9 Cost AWS
Right-size ECS tasks and Fargate services
Fargate bills for the vCPU and memory you request in the task definition, not what your containers actually use — over-requesting is pure waste, multiplied by every running task.
15 min - 10 Cost AWS
Right-size Lambda function memory
Memory is the only dial on a Lambda — and it controls CPU and network too. Set it wrong and you either overpay on idle RAM or pay more on slow runs.
14 min - 11 Cost AWS
Right-size Lambda provisioned concurrency
Provisioned concurrency keeps execution environments warm to kill cold starts — but you pay for every warm second whether traffic uses it or not. Set it wrong and you're heating an empty room around the clock.
13 min - 12 Cost AWS
Migrate Lambda functions to Graviton (ARM)
Roughly 20% lower price per GB-second, plus better price-performance that shortens duration — a one-line flip for pure-interpreted runtimes, real build work for native dependencies.
15 min - 13 Cost AWS
Switch DynamoDB tables between on-demand and provisioned capacity
DynamoDB has two billing modes priced an order of magnitude apart — picking the wrong one per table is one of the quietest, most common ways to overpay for a database that's working perfectly.
14 min - 14 Cost AWS
Convert idle RDS to Aurora Serverless v2
A dev database that sits idle nights and weekends still pays full price 24/7 on provisioned RDS — Aurora Serverless v2 scales capacity down when no one's using it, so you stop renting a box that's mostly asleep.
15 min - 15 Cost AWS
Migrate Aurora to I/O-Optimized
Aurora Standard charges per I/O request — for I/O-heavy clusters that bill is unpredictable and large. I/O-Optimized removes it entirely. Know the breakeven before you switch.
14 min