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