AWS – Cost breakdown

🧾 Overview of Cost Considerations by Service

1. DynamoDB

• 💡 On-demand vs provisioned:
  • Provisioned is cheaper if access is predictable. Use Auto Scaling if uncertain.
• 🔁 Avoid hot partitions: Distribute access evenly using good partition key design.
• ⏳ Enable TTL (Time To Live): Automatically delete stale data.
• 💾 Use DAX or caching (e.g., with Amplify or Lambda) to reduce reads.
• 📦 Watch storage: Monitor size growth. Large payloads = large bills.
• 🧹 Clean up unused tables in non-prod environments.

2. AWS Amplify

• 💡 Use only necessary Amplify features:
  Hosting, auth, storage, GraphQL APIs can rack up costs—disable unused categories.
• 💸 Hosting costs scale with usage + storage.
  Optimize asset size and invalidate old builds.
• 🔁 Avoid redeploying often, especially for small changes.
• 🔒 Use environment-specific backends, but clean up unused ones.

3. Lambda

• ⏱ Keep functions fast: You’re billed for time * RAM.
• 📦 Minimize memory allocation: 128MB is cheap, 512MB+ adds up fast.
• 🧪 Use Lambda Power Tuning to find optimal memory/runtime balance.
• ⚠️ Avoid recursive calls or poorly terminated functions.
• 🧹 Delete unused versions and clean up layers.

4. CloudFormation

• 📋 Free itself, but can create cost-incurring resources.
• 🛑 Be careful with templates that create high-tier instances/services by default.
• 🧹 Remove old stacks/environments in test/dev.

5. CloudWatch

• 📊 Logs and metrics cost money! Especially retention.
  • Keep short log retention for dev/test (e.g., 3 days).
  • Set log filters selectively (don’t log everything).
• 🧽 Use aws logs delete-log-group to clean up unused logs.
• 💡 Consider exporting logs to S3 and deleting from CW if needed long-term.

6. API Gateway

• 💸 REST APIs are more expensive than HTTP APIs.
  • Use HTTP APIs when you don’t need advanced features (e.g. authorizers, WAF).
• 🧪 Use usage plans + throttling + quotas.
• 🔒 Enable caching to reduce Lambda invocations.

7. IAM

• 👀 No direct cost, but indirect:
  • Ensure least privilege: Accidental access to high-cost resources can spike bills.
  • Monitor role usage (some features are billable).

🔍 General Recommendations

🔔 1. Set Budgets and Alerts

• Use AWS Budgets and Cost Anomaly Detection.
• Enable notifications on spikes in Lambda invocations, API calls, storage usage, etc.

📦 2. Tag All Resources

• Use cost allocation tags like env, team, project.
• Group by environment to isolate cost-heavy dev or test setups.

🌍 3. Minimize Environments

• Don’t keep too many dev/test environments running 24/7.
• Automate teardown and re-creation when possible.

🧠 4. Use Savings Plans or Reserved Instances

• If you have predictable Lambda/Compute usage.

📈 5. Monitor with Cost Explorer

• Check cost per service, daily granularity.
• Enable Resource-level tracking.

✅ Pro Tips

Goal	Strategy
Reduce Lambda cost	Optimize memory + runtime, use async when possible
Reduce API Gateway cost	Switch to HTTP APIs, enable caching, combine endpoints
Reduce DynamoDB cost	Provisioned capacity + Auto Scaling, optimize reads/writes
Reduce Amplify cost	Host only necessary features, minimize build frequency
Reduce CloudWatch cost	Shorten log retention, remove unnecessary metrics/logs
General cleanup	Automate stack/resource teardown in dev, especially Amplify environments