How to Reduce AWS Costs by 40% Without Sacrificing Performance

Where AWS Money Goes to Waste

• Over-provisioned EC2: Running large instances for small workloads 24/7.
• Idle resources: Dev/staging environments running on weekends.
• Storage bloat: Old S3 backups, unused EBS volumes, forgotten snapshots.
• On-demand pricing: Paying full price for predictable baseline workloads.

The Fix

• Right-size: Use AWS Compute Optimizer. Most instances can drop 1-2 sizes.
• Auto-scale: Match compute to actual demand, not peak estimates.
• Reserved/Savings Plans: 40-60% savings on baseline workloads.
• S3 Lifecycle: Auto-move old data to Glacier.
• Spot Instances: 70-90% savings for batch processing and CI/CD.

For NordShop, we cut AWS spend by 40% in 90 days using these exact strategies.