AWS offers a diverse variety of instance types and sizes for their operation.  Although flexible, we found that many users pick instances that are far more powerful than they actually needed, which can lead to unnecessary costs.

With EC2, one gets high-end powerful servers up and running within minutes. Flexibility is patent, and users have diversity of types and sizes of resources at their disposal. When it comes to choosing the instance type though, a common mistake is to pick one that is far more powerful the application immediate needs. Then you get your cloud set up running with a brick-and-mortar datacenter utilization pattern, with the corresponding price tag on it. Granted, you need to stop the instance in order to resize it, yet this is still a simple and quick operation. And this is what AWS users seem to forget: the same simplicity it takes to provision the instance in first place doesn’t go away – this is the magic of the cloud, the resources and the simplicity will still be around later, when you really need the capacity. Meanwhile, you can just use the real amount of resources your application needs, and spend the right amount of resources.

Keywords: aws instance types, aws costs, ec2, cloud computing, aws datacenter