Newvem’s Opinion

There is a strong relationship between the budget of an AWS user and their efficiency.

• Users with small budgets tend to have a higher amount of idle instances.  For instance, AWS users with a monthly budget of less than $1,000 tend to operate with more than 50% of their total instances as idle, revealing an estimated $500/month in potential cost savings.
• Larger budgets operate their instances more efficiently.  Users with a monthly spend of $3,000 or more operate their AWS instances more efficiently; based on our sample efficiency becomes more efficient as the spend increases.  Despite this efficiency, there is still a significant amount of idle instances running, which complicate costs further.
• There is an efficiency chasm that needs to be crossed when users scale from medium size to larger size spends.   As users begin to spend more than $3,000/month there is a negative impact on efficiency as the scale their AWS footprint.

Keywords: aws ec2 cost, aws overspending, idle instances, aws efficiency.