How we cut our AWS costs by more than 50%

SuperTokens, a managed service hosted primarily on AWS, undertook significant infrastructure changes to reduce its AWS billing by more than 50%. Initially, the service operated in two modes: a Development mode that efficiently ran multiple instances on a single EC2 T3.small instance and a Production mode that required separate EC2 T2.micro instances for each deployment, resulting in longer setup times. Early optimizations included creating a custom AMI with pre-installed Docker to reduce setup time for production instances. However, as user numbers and infrastructure costs increased, with AWS credits depleting, a more substantial change became necessary. The introduction of a multi-tenancy feature allowed for the consolidation of EC2 core instances, effectively cutting costs while maintaining performance, with further details of these changes to be explored in the series' second part.