Compute is the largest line item in most AWS bills, and EC2 costs are almost always the top contributor. It is where most cost optimization efforts are focused, and yet it is also where most inefficiencies persist.
The reason is not lack of awareness. It’s fragmentation.
EC2 cost management demands attention across many fronts. Rightsizing, scheduling, instance selection, auto scaling, commitment management and each has its own nuances, tradeoffs, and tooling. Workloads scale up during traffic spikes and scale down at unpredictable intervals. Teams shift architectures, experiment with Graviton, spin up test environments, or launch new services. These changes make optimization a moving target.
The result is often a constant state of reactivity. Teams chase savings but rarely catch up. And the time it takes to manage every lever can outweigh the return. This is where the 80/20 rule becomes critical. The rule says 80% of your impact will come from the 20% of high-leverage actions. The challenge is knowing which levers to prioritize and having the discipline to ignore the rest.
This blog will help you cut through the noise. It outlines the most effective EC2 optimization strategies so your team can reduce spend without wasting time on low-yield tactics.
What Are the Pricing Options With Amazon EC2?
Optimizing EC2 costs starts with choosing the right pricing model. It is the foundation of every downstream savings effort. If you’re not using the right blend of options from the start, no amount of rightsizing or scheduling will close the gap.
That’s why it is critical to step back and assess your current workloads: how predictable they are, how long they run, how frequently they change. Only then can you align your usage with the pricing models that offer the best balance of cost, flexibility, and risk. And the first step to that analysis is understanding the different EC2 pricing options available:
AWS Free Tier
The AWS Free Tier provides limited, short-term access to EC2 and other services at no cost, primarily for new users exploring AWS. It is available for 12 months after account creation and includes usage of selected micro instance types with basic Linux or Windows operating systems. While helpful for testing or learning, it is not designed for production or high-usage workloads, and overages can incur charges.
Amazon EC2 On-Demand Pricing
A pay-as-you-go model with no upfront commitment. You pay per second or hour based on instance type and region. While flexible, it is also the most expensive option and should be used sparingly for spiky or short-lived workloads.
Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances (RIs)
A discount mechanism that offers AWS users up to 72% savings when compared to On-Demand pricing in exchange for committing to a one- or three-year term. Users can choose from different payment options, including All Upfront, Partial Upfront, or No Upfront. The choice affects the discount level, with All Upfront offering the highest savings.
Amazon EC2 Savings Plans (SPs)
Instead of locking into specific instance types like RIs, AWS Savings Plans apply to all eligible usage within a family, region, or across AWS services. You make an aggregate hourly post-discount dollar commitment (e.g., $9.57/hr for one year), and then AWS applies discounts automatically on eligible usage.
Amazon EC2 Spot Instances:
Spot instances offer steep discounts, up to 90 percent, by using spare AWS EC2 capacity. Spot Instances can be reclaimed by AWS with short notice, so they are best used for fault-tolerant, stateless, or batch workloads where interruptions are acceptable. The market-driven pricing can also lead to unpredictable usage costs.
12 Best Practices for EC2 Cost Optimization
Successful EC2 cost optimization doesn’t start with instance tuning or commitment planning. It starts with laying the groundwork. Choosing the right pricing model, enforcing consistent tagging to the right teams or services, and building shared accountability across engineering and finance: these AWS cost optimization best practices create the visibility and ownership needed to optimize effectively.
But once that foundation is in place, the real work begins.
This section focuses on the practical, high-leverage actions that directly reduce EC2 costs. These are not abstract principles or long-term cultural shifts. These are the steps that make a measurable impact on your AWS bill, when applied at the right time and in the right environment.
1. Choose the right instance types for your workloads
Choosing the wrong instance type is one of the most common sources of EC2 waste. Teams often default to general-purpose instances or copy previous configurations without validating whether the workload still fits the chosen specs. This leads to overprovisioned memory, underutilized CPUs, or worse — hidden performance bottlenecks.
Instead, benchmark your workloads against actual resource usage. Look at CPU, memory, network, and disk I/O patterns using tools like CloudWatch. If the workload is compute-intensive, consider C-series. If it’s memory-heavy, look into R-series or X-series. For bursty workloads, T-series may suffice.
Avoid using the same instance type across environments just for simplicity. Dev, staging, and prod likely have different needs and should be treated as such.
Finally, consider moving to newer generations of instances. For example, moving from M5 to M7 can deliver better performance per dollar. AWS doesn’t automatically upgrade your fleet, so the burden is on your team to reassess periodically.
2. Use auto scaling to match capacity with demand
Static provisioning is expensive. When EC2 capacity is fixed to handle peak load, you’re paying for headroom during idle hours. This is especially common in batch processing, web applications, and internal services where traffic fluctuates but infrastructure does not.
Auto Scaling fixes this by dynamically adjusting capacity based on real-time demand. It allows for both horizontal scaling as well as vertical scaling i.e. growth in same or different instance types as needed.
But to make it effective, configuration matters. Set realistic minimum and maximum thresholds. Use meaningful metrics, CPU and memory alone aren’t always enough. For web services, request count or latency may be a better scaling trigger.
Also, avoid overly aggressive cooldown periods. If your policies scale up too quickly or too often, costs can spike. Start with conservative rules, monitor behavior, then refine.
Combine Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) with Spot Instances or Graviton-based fleets to increase efficiency without compromising availability. And if your workloads scale horizontally, consider using containers with ECS or EKS, where scaling decisions can be made at the task or pod level, not only the instance level.
3. Rightsize instances continuously, not periodically
Rightsizing is not a one-time task. Usage patterns shift, services evolve, and what was “just right” three months ago may now be oversized or underpowered. Periodic audits often miss these shifts, leading to prolonged inefficiencies.
Instead, implement continuous rightsizing. Use CloudWatch metrics or third-party tools to monitor average and peak utilization over rolling windows. Look for sustained low CPU or memory usage (e.g., under 40 percent over 14 days) as a trigger to downsize. For containers, monitor task-level resource limits to avoid overallocating cluster capacity.
Be especially cautious with memory-bound applications. Low CPU usage can mislead if memory is fully consumed. Always evaluate both dimensions.
Also, account for bursty or cyclical workloads. For these, consider moving to burstable (T-series) or auto-scaled environments rather than locking into a large instance that idles most of the time.
The goal is not just smaller instances, it’s better alignment. Rightsizing should reduce cost without degrading performance. That only happens when it’s ongoing, not occasional.
4. Adopt graviton instances where applicable
Graviton-powered instances offer better price-performance than their x86 counterparts for many workloads. But adoption still lags, mostly due to inertia, compatibility concerns, or the assumption that migration is too complex.
The reality is, for most Linux-based workloads running in higher-level languages (Java, Node.js, Python, Go), the shift requires minimal effort. In many cases, it’s as simple as swapping the AMI and verifying that your software stack supports ARM architecture. For containerized environments, building multi-arch images makes the transition even smoother.
Start with non-critical services or dev/test environments. Benchmark performance and validate compatibility. Then, roll out to production gradually where gains are clear.
Delaying this move leaves money on the table. For compute-heavy, scale-out workloads, the cost advantage is significant, and measurable within your next billing cycle.
5. Shut down idle or underutilized instances on a schedule
Many EC2 instances run 24/7 — not because they need to, but because no one thought to turn them off. Dev, QA, staging, or analytics environments are frequent culprits. These workloads are typically used during business hours but continue running overnight, on weekends, and even during company holidays.
This is avoidable cloud waste.
Scheduling shutdowns for non-production environments can deliver immediate savings without any impact on availability. AWS Instance Scheduler can help, but it requires ongoing setup and management. For teams needing a streamlined solution, using a unified solution like ProsperOps Scheduler can automate these stop-start actions based on near-real-time insights.
Stopping instances for 12 hours a day can cut their cost nearly in half. With the right schedule, the savings add up fast.
Don’t pay for idle time. Build in the logic to shut things down or automate it.
6. Diversify and automate discount instrument management
Reserved Instances and Savings Plans can significantly reduce EC2 costs, but most teams fail to use them to their full potential. The core challenge is timing: Buy too much, too early, and you risk overcommitment. Buy too little, too late, and you lose out on savings.
The most effective strategy is not to make one big purchase and walk away. Instead, adopt a rolling or laddered commitment strategy. This means spreading purchases out over time, starting with smaller commitments, then layering in additional coverage as usage patterns stabilize. It avoids lock-in while still capturing long-term discounts.
Blend different term lengths and instruments. Choose a blend of one and three-year instruments to achieve great savings while maintaining frequent, staggered expirations, offering decision points to avoid overcovering as usage changes. Use Convertible RIs or Compute Saving Plans for evolving workloads and Standard RIs or EC2 SPs for stable, high-confidence services. Reevaluate your commitment portfolio frequently, not just during annual reviews. Usage patterns shift, and your commitment mix should adapt with them.
Don’t aim for 100 percent coverage overnight. Target incremental gains while tracking key metrics like Effective Savings Rate (ESR) and Commitment Lock-in Risk (CLR) to guide your next move.
For a detailed breakdown of strategies like bulk vs. incremental commitment buying, and how high-performing FinOps teams manage risk, read our Advanced AWS Commitment Management Strategies guide.
7. Use elastic load balancing efficiently
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and Auto Scaling often work together, but they solve different problems. Auto Scaling adjusts the number of EC2 instances based on demand. ELB, on the other hand, distributes incoming traffic across those instances to maintain performance and availability.
While EC2 typically gets the cost attention, ELB can quietly add up, especially in large or dynamic environments. You pay per hour for each active balancer, plus data processing charges per GB. That means unused load balancers, idle target groups, or unnecessary cross-zone traffic can significantly inflate your bill.
Start by auditing your load balancer footprint. Remove unused or duplicate Application Load Balancers or Network Load Balancers, often left behind after migrations or service deprecations. Review each target group and ensure only active, healthy instances are attached. Orphaned resources behind a load balancer still incur costs.
If you use Auto Scaling, double-check how new instances are registered. Misaligned health checks or scaling thresholds can lead to overprovisioning, increasing both EC2 and ELB costs.
Finally, monitor your traffic patterns using ELB access logs and CloudWatch. If certain services experience uneven load or rarely used endpoints are spread across zones, consider rebalancing to reduce inter-AZ data transfer charges.
ELB is easy to set and forget, but that is exactly why it needs regular review.
8. Delete or terminate unused stopped instances
Stopping an EC2 instance pauses billing for the metered box usage, but NOT for all instance-related costs. Many teams assume a stopped instance means zero cost, but that’s not the case. You still pay for associated EBS volumes, Elastic IPs (if unattached), and other linked resources like snapshots or network interfaces.
Over time, environments accumulate stopped instances, left behind after experiments, staging cycles, or forgotten migrations. These idle assets contribute to cloud sprawl and ongoing charges without delivering any value.
Start by identifying stopped instances that have been idle for more than a week. For each, ask: is this needed again? If not, terminate it. But don’t stop there, also review attached EBS volumes, IPs, and AMIs. These often survive instance termination and continue to generate hidden costs.
Use automation to clean up regularly. Set lifecycle policies, tag ephemeral resources for auto-expiry, or integrate cleanup scripts into your CI/CD process. Cloud cost tools can help surface these inefficiencies, but someone has to take action.
What you don’t clean up, you continue to pay for.
9. Optimize data transfer between services and regions
Data transfer costs in AWS can be subtle but expensive, especially when they involve EC2 instances. Moving data across Availability Zones (AZs), Regions, or out to the internet is not free, and these charges are often buried under broader EC2 or networking costs.
For example, sending data between EC2 instances in different AZs within the same region incurs inter-AZ charges. Transferring data across regions or to on-prem environments racks up even more. If traffic routes through a Load Balancer, additional data processing fees apply.
Start by analyzing your flow of data. Use VPC Flow Logs and Cost Explorer’s data transfer view to identify high-volume connections. Are workloads unnecessarily communicating across AZs? Can services be co-located within the same zone or VPC?
Where possible, use AWS PrivateLink or VPC Endpoints to keep traffic within the AWS network and reduce NAT gateway usage. For high-throughput use cases, consider compressing data or batching transfers to reduce volume.
If you’re replicating data or serving content globally, look at whether EC2 is the right tool or if S3 with CloudFront or AWS Global Accelerator would be more cost-efficient.
Data transfer charges are easy to overlook but can quietly erode EC2 savings. Optimize them with the same discipline you apply to compute.
10. Tune storage attached to EC2 instances (EBS and Snapshots)
EC2 instance costs often get attention, but attached storage, especially Elastic Block Storage (EBS), can quietly consume a significant portion of your bill. Many teams over-allocate EBS volumes by default, use high-performance volume types unnecessarily, or forget to clean up snapshots and unattached volumes.
Start by auditing current EBS usage. Using CloudWatch or Compute Optimizer, identify volumes with consistently low IOPS or throughput and evaluate whether they can be downgraded to cheaper volume types like gp3 or st1. For non-critical or infrequently accessed data, sc1 can also offer savings with acceptable performance tradeoffs.
Watch out for unattached EBS volumes. These are created when instances are terminated but volumes are retained, often unintentionally. Use AWS Trusted Advisor or Cost Explorer to identify and remove them safely.
Snapshots are another common source of waste. While cheap individually, large or frequent snapshots can add up quickly. Set up lifecycle policies to automatically delete older versions and consolidate backup routines.
Also, evaluate whether your storage choices align with workload patterns. For example, using Provisioned IOPS (io2) for a dev environment or short-lived job is almost always overkill.
Storage optimization is less visible than compute, but the savings are just as real when scaled across environments.
11. Monitor, review, and iterate on cost drivers regularly
EC2 cost optimization is not a one-time effort, it is a continuous process. Workloads evolve, teams launch new services, and usage patterns shift. What was right last quarter may no longer be efficient today.
To stay ahead, you need regular reviews of your EC2 environment. Go beyond billing dashboards. Monitor cost trends, track coverage levels from RIs and SPs, identify newly launched instance types, and compare performance-cost ratios across instance families.
Set clear FinOps KPIs like Effective Savings Rate (ESR) and percentage of on-demand usage. These give you a directional sense of how well your optimization efforts are working and where they are falling short.
Use tools like AWS Cost Explorer, CloudWatch, or third-party FinOps platforms to surface anomalies, idle resources, or new optimization opportunities. But data alone is not enough, schedule frequent (weekly, monthly, or quarterly) reviews to act on it.
Make optimization a habit, not an exception. Teams that iterate regularly save more over time – not because they make perfect decisions, but because they course-correct often.
12. Automate wherever practical to reduce manual overhead
Manual cost management works, until scale breaks it. As infrastructure grows, so does the complexity of managing EC2-related decisions. Without automation, cost-saving opportunities get delayed, deprioritized, or missed entirely.
Start by automating the basics. Use ProsperOps Scheduler for non-production environments, lifecycle policies for cleaning up old EBS snapshots, and Auto Scaling Groups to manage burst capacity. Set up AWS Cost Anomaly Detection to catch unexpected spikes early. Tag resources consistently so automation scripts can act based on environment, owner, or purpose.
For discount instruments, automate where the stakes are highest. Commitment management involves constant tracking, forecasting, and adjustment, making it a strong candidate for intelligent automation. Platforms like ProsperOps help by automatically blending Reserved Instances and Savings Plans in real time, ensuring high savings without the manual overhead.
The goal is not to automate everything. It is to automate repeatable, time-consuming tasks so your team can focus on where human input adds the most value.
Improve Your AWS Cost Optimization Efforts With ProsperOps
Managing AWS costs manually is complex, time-consuming, and prone to inefficiencies. While AWS provides native cost management tools, they often require constant monitoring, manual intervention, and deep expertise to extract maximum savings.
ProsperOps helps businesses automate cloud cost optimization, eliminate waste, and maximize savings, ensuring that every cloud dollar is spent effectively.
ProsperOps delivers cloud savings-as-a-service, automatically blending discount instruments to maximize your savings while lowering Commitment Lock-in Risk. Using our Autonomous Discount Management platform, we optimize the hyperscaler’s native discount instruments to reduce your cloud spend and place you in the 98th percentile of FinOps teams.
This hands-free approach to cloud cost optimization can save your team valuable time while ensuring automation continually optimizes your AWS, Azure, and Google cloud discounts for maximum Effective Savings Rate (ESR).
In addition to autonomous rate optimization, ProsperOps now supports usage optimization through its resource scheduling feature, ProsperOps Scheduler. Our customers using Autonomous Discount Management™ (ADM) can now automate resource state changes on weekly schedules to reduce waste and lower cloud spend.
Make the most of your cloud spend with ProsperOps. Schedule your free demo today!
