Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?

Over the years we have done a number of things, probably the most impactful was auto-scaling on our core engines. Whenever we scale down it's just like scooping money out.

What did you lose? We've seen some interesting things like lowering precision of timestamps and gps have large impact because zip doesn't work as well on basically random numbers.

What helped when we first got started is more quickly terminate test/development environments. We'd often launch a full environment to test out a theory or do a POC without touching the regular development, staging and production environments. It would often happen that those environments would run a little longer than supposed to. We've put automated systems in place that detect inactivity and notify us.

This only helped cut our bill before we launched and started spending more and more money on our production environment when these kind of things still made up a significant amount of our a bill.

Consider Lambda over EC2.

Cross-AZ fees can add up!