Cut your storage bill
From gp2→gp3 and lifecycle policies to snapshot hygiene: squeeze the storage bill.
Lessons in this path
- 1 Cost AWS
Migrate EBS volumes from gp2 to gp3
Same baseline performance, ~20% cheaper, online change — the EBS upgrade with no downside.
15 min - 2 Cost AWS
Prune ancient EBS snapshots
Years of incremental snapshots silently outgrow their source volumes — find the long tail and decide what's still recoverable.
14 min - 3 Cost AWS
Delete unattached EBS volumes
An "available" EBS volume costs the same as an attached one — find what's lingering and snapshot-then-delete before the bill compounds.
13 min - 4 Cost AWS
Right-size EBS storage volumes
Match volume size, IOPS, and throughput to actual usage — most gp3 volumes are provisioned for headroom nobody uses.
14 min - 5 Cost AWS
Tame excessive S3 object versioning
Versioning is on, lifecycle rules aren't — buckets quietly accumulate every overwrite and delete-marker forever. Find them and trim the tail.
14 min - 6 Cost AWS
Prune old manual RDS snapshots
Automated RDS snapshots roll off with the retention window — manual snapshots stay until you delete them. Find the long tail and clean it up.
12 min - 7 Cost AWS
Deregister unused AMIs and their snapshots
AMIs are free; the EBS snapshots backing them aren't — clean up years of forgotten golden images.
13 min - 8 Cost AWS
Set retention on CloudWatch log groups
By default log groups keep data forever — set a retention policy and let AWS prune the long tail automatically.
12 min - 9 Cost AWS
Transition S3 objects to cheaper storage classes
When access is predictable, lifecycle transition rules slide aging objects down the storage-class price ladder — but the wrong threshold can cost more than it saves.
14 min - 10 Cost AWS
Enable S3 Intelligent-Tiering on high-churn buckets
When you can't predict how data will be accessed, stop guessing at lifecycle rules — let S3 move each object to the right tier automatically, with no retrieval fees.
14 min - 11 Cost AWS
Migrate EBS volumes from io1 to io2
Same price per GB and per IOPS, 100x better durability, and cheaper at high IOPS — io2 is the rare free upgrade with an online migration path.
12 min - 12 Cost AWS
Right-size EFS throughput mode
Provisioned Throughput bills a fixed bandwidth reservation 24/7 whether you use it or not — most file systems are better off on Elastic or Bursting.
13 min - 13 Compliance AWS
Configure lifecycle and versioning policies
One capability across S3 buckets, versioned buckets and ECR repositories: attach lifecycle rules so storage tiers, expires and prunes on a schedule you choose, instead of accumulating every object and image forever.
13 min