[spectre256]

The two most insidious things I've found in AWS billing:

- If you want the AWS dashboard metrics to have 1 minute instead of 5 minute granularity, that's $2.10 per instance per month. 5 minutes is pretty useless, so either you set up other monitoring or you pay a tax on the number of instances you have.

- If you use AMIs (which you probably should) to launch EC2 instances with all your software baked in already, you will probably end up with dozens or hundreds of old, unused AMIs. Furthermore each of these AMIs is linked to a snapshot, which is stored on S3. S3 pricing is very cheap but it's a significant amount of work to determine which AMIs are no longer in use and to delete both the AMI and the corresponding snapshot. Every 100 AMIs you have at the standard 8GB root volume size costs you $18/month.

[Someone1234]

> If you use AMIs (which you probably should) to launch EC2 instances with all your software baked in already, you will probably end up with dozens or hundreds of old, unused AMIs.

We previously had this issue. What we do now is instead of leaving old ones on S3, we download and archive them. We just tag them on the dashboard and a nightly script does the rest.

In general tagging is an extremely powerful way to organize your AMIs. This article[0] has good examples of tagging you can follow. We use something akin to the "Business Tag" strategy, with an Excel document. Definitely requires some internal organisation but the cost savings speak for themselves.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/answers/configuration-management/aws-...