Provision only the bare amount needed to meet your workload
- scale in/out as needed
- use a mix of reserved/spot/on demand
- reserved covers the minimum usage
- spot/on demand scaled as needed
- less wastage with many smaller instances as opposed to fewer large instances
- t2 types cost-effective for bursty workloads, as with a web-server
Tag all resources
- e.g. environment (dev, testing, prod), function (web-app, rendering etc)
- this allows costs to be more easily tracked
- also allows non-production resources to be shutdown when not in use (e.g. outside of business hours)