In-depth guides on AWS cost management, FinOps practices, rightsizing, Reserved Instances, and Savings Plans. Our engineers share real billing teardowns, unit economics frameworks, and cost anomaly playbooks from production environments.
On Jul 21, 2026 AWS shipped SES Essentials, Pro ($105/region), and Enterprise ($500/region). At 2M emails/mo a Pro-like a-la-carte stack runs ~$1,793 vs Pro plan ~$553 — switch only when you need the bundled stack.
CloudZero, Vantage, Finout, nOps, ProsperOps, and Kubecost on AWS — platform selection guide plus who implements tagging, allocation, and architecture savings.
Production guide for Kubecost on AWS EKS — cost allocation setup plus architecture changes that reduce spend, not just attribute it.
Implement ProsperOps on AWS — Savings Plans automation works best after baseline modeling and architecture stability. Production checklist included.
EC2 On-Demand is a matrix of family, size, OS, tenancy, and region. In us-east-1 (June 2026) a m7g.large Linux runs $0.0816/hr vs a g5.xlarge GPU at $1.006/hr. Graviton5 M9g/C9g now GA for new fleets.
ElastiCache bills node-hours for Redis/Valkey clusters and ECPUs for Serverless. A cache.r7g.large with two replicas is 3× the primary node cost before data transfer. Serverless wins below ~$800/mo steady cache spend; provisioned nodes win above it.
Fargate bills per vCPU-second and GB-second, not per task hour. In us-east-1 a 0.25 vCPU / 0.5 GB task runs ~$9/mo; a 4 vCPU / 16 GB task ~$145/mo. Prefer arm64 + C9g/C8g when moving steady-state to ECS on EC2.
A 22-account AWS Organization spent $1.1M/yr on Compute Savings Plans but applied only 61% to production — dev sandboxes burned the commit while prod stayed On-Demand. Group Sharing (April 2026) fixed attribution; the waste was $312k/yr before they restructured purchases.
CUR 2.0 (generally available 2024, default for new exports in 2025) adds line-item resource IDs and Savings Plan attribution columns Athena needs for serious chargeback. A standard FinOps query pack answers top-10 services, untagged spend, and SP coverage in under 60 seconds.
Compute Optimizer added 32-day lookback for cyclic workloads in 2025 — critical for monthly batch jobs that looked oversized on 14-day windows. In a June 2026 audit of a $48k/mo account, rightsizing recommendations alone modeled $11k/mo savings at low performance risk.
Aurora bills instance hours plus storage plus I/O — or storage at a 125% premium with I/O bundled (I/O-Optimized). Serverless v2 at $0.12 per ACU-hour wins on variable workloads, loses on steady traffic above 4 ACU. Global Database doubles the price per secondary region plus replicated-write fees. Backtrack adds per-change-record cost most teams never factor in.
Bedrock AgentCore is metered across twelve distinct components — Runtime, Browser, Code Interpreter, Gateway, Identity, Memory (two tiers), Observability, Evaluations, Payments, Search, and the underlying model spend. Two of them drive 80% of the bill.
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