#Cost
21 posts
ECS Fargate vs EC2: Spec Combinations and Price Compared
A working standard for choosing ECS compute: the structural difference between per-task billing (Fargate) and per-instance billing (EC2), the vCPU/memory grid Fargate allows (0.25-16 vCPU, up to 120GB), what the premium actually amounts to at equal specs, the point where utilization and bin packing flip the comparison, and the levers that cut the bill — ARM, Spot, and Savings Plans.
RDS Instance Classes Compared: db.t vs db.m vs db.r
A working standard for choosing RDS instance classes: the db. prefix on EC2 naming rules, why the same hardware costs roughly twice as much (management included, Multi-AZ extra), why db.t does not belong in production, the buffer-pool criterion that separates db.m from db.r, and why moving to Graviton is easier on RDS than on EC2.
EC2 Instance Families Compared: Choosing Between t, m, c, and r
A working standard for choosing EC2 instance types: how to read type names (family, generation, attributes), when the t burstable model fits and when it backfires, the vCPU-to-memory ratios behind m, c, and r with large-size price comparisons, choosing between Graviton, Intel, and AMD, and sizing from CloudWatch and Compute Optimizer measurements.
gp3 vs io2 — How to Choose an EBS Volume Type
A working standard for choosing EBS volume types: the legacy of gp2's size-coupled, burst-credit model, gp3's independent provisioning and raised ceilings (80,000 IOPS, 2,000MB/s), the conditions that actually justify io2 Block Express, sizing IOPS from measurements, and converting gp2 to gp3 with no downtime.
Migrating EC2 to Graviton — Real Savings and a Migration Checklist
What moving x86 instances to Graviton (arm64) actually saves, and the procedure for getting there: the generation landscape (Graviton4 mainstream, Graviton5 GA), which workloads move easily and where it gets stuck, multi-architecture image builds, canary cutover, and extending to RDS and Lambda.
AWS Services and Settings That Quietly Leak Money — a Standing Checklist
The waste that raises your AWS baseline without ever making a spike: leftover gp2 volumes, public IPv4 addresses, NAT Gateway by design, logs retained forever, old instance generations, abandoned load balancers, S3 storage classes, and dev environments running around the clock — with how to check each one.
When Your AWS Bill Suddenly Jumps — the 10 Most Common Causes
A field guide for the month your AWS bill doubles: the order for finding the culprit, and the ten causes that come up most in practice — NAT Gateway data processing, CloudWatch Logs ingestion, snapshot accumulation, data transfer, expiring RIs and Savings Plans — each with how to confirm it and what to do.
K8s Practice #6: Operations Checklist — Upgrades / Backup,Recovery / Cost / Security
The last post in the K8s Practice series. Bringing up a cluster and operating it safely for a year are different kinds of work. This post organizes the EKS upgrade cycle, node group replacement pattern, RDS automated backup and PITR, cost management with Karpenter and Spot, and regular security checks with kube-bench and Trivy. It also includes a retrospective of the 6-post K8s Practice series and the full 26-post K8s track.
AWS Basics #3: Cost Management — Billing Alerts, Cost Explorer, Free Tier
The limits of the Free Tier, setting up AWS Budgets / billing alerts, analyzing the bill with Cost Explorer, and a tag strategy that holds up in production — the guardrail that prevents first-bill shock.