10 best practices to reduce AWS EC2 costs

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) can become a significant expense for organizations as their compute requirements grow, but several best practices can help optimize usage and reduce costs. Selecting the right EC2 instance type tailored to specific workloads, such as compute- or memory-intensive tasks, and opting for ARM-based or AMD instances over Intel CPUs can lead to cost savings. Employing the latest volume types, like GP3, and leveraging Saving Plans or Reserved Instances can yield substantial discounts over time. Utilizing Spot instances for flexible workloads, auto-scaling groups to match resource use with demand, and tools to detect and resize underutilized or idle resources can further reduce expenses. Additionally, stopping non-production instances during off-hours and using solutions like Karpenter in EKS clusters to dynamically adjust resources according to microservice needs are effective strategies. Tools such as AWS Trusted Advisor and Lightlytics provide real-time guidance and insights to optimize infrastructure, identify savings opportunities, and manage resources efficiently.