Making sure you don't overspend on AWS is a perennial challenge for many software companies. To help make sure you don't surpass your budget, AWS offers billing alerts, which send you an alert when your costs have reached a certain threshold. This can be a handy way to keep your costs in check, but can take some time to set up and will cost you some extra money.

It is no secret that it is not that hard to accidentally spend a boatload of money on AWS. This Twitter user told the story of his $77,000 mistake with a monkey emoji (because what’s funnier than spending the price of an entry level Tesla by accident.) The scary part is that many of us have been there. If you are not looking at your cloud bill every day, it is easy to let the costs run up quickly, then suffer from bill shock when it arrives a month later.

We’re often asked what are some of the top areas where we see customers overspending? Data transfer costs from misconfigured NAT Gateway definitely tops our list as one of the most common. In this article we’ll walk you through five steps to find which data transfers you’re overspending on and how to you can eliminate those excess charges.

Amazon recently announced the rollout of their new AWS Savings Plans, a new way to reduce your cloud compute costs. These allow you to achieve the discounts associated with their popular Reserved Instances (up to 72% off on-demand pricing) without having to engage in the headache of managing the same. With the new plans, you would commit to a particular hourly spend of your choosing on either a 1 year or 3 year fixed term.

The popularity of serverless infrastructure, like AWS Lambda, is on the rise, which is easy to understand, given its promise of a cheaper price tag and less maintenance. However, as companies are lifting and shifting apps into lambda, many are discovering that it’s not that simple. Like any shift, such as moving from on-prem to the cloud, the reality is, applications need to be designed a certain way in order for you to reap the cost and efficiency benefits.

Last week, Amazon announced the end of the reserved instance, commonly known as the “RI”, with the announcement of their new replacement, “AWS Savings Plans”.

If your business depends on AWS cloud services, you’re probably familiar with the experience of having unexpected, hidden charges crop up on your monthly invoice. At times, the AWS cost structure can be quite opaque, making it difficult to accurately gauge in advance the costs of hosting a given application. One of the most common sources of unanticipated AWS charges is the service’s data transfer fees.

IDC predicts a ten-fold increase in data by 2025, which should surprise just about no one. We are all producing more and more data every day—more data than ever before, with no slowdown in sight. Recently we joined forces with our friends over at CHAOSSEARCH to deliver a webinar on the topic of Big Data Done Right—How to Spend Less While You Store & Analyze More. In this webcast, we discussed some best practices around big data storage, transfer, and access.

If your company uses AWS, chances are you’ve considered developing a cloud optimization strategy. Since AWS resources can infinitely scale, many organizations find themselves in a conundrum where they’re not using these resources efficiently. However, a good cloud optimization strategy could potentially save an organization thousands, if not millions of dollars per year. Rather than be surprised by one more AWS bill, now is the time to think about your strategy.

If you’re anything like our customers, you’re running the majority of your business on the cloud. After headcount, it’s not uncommon that your cloud bill is one of your highest business expenses. So, it’s important to make sure you are getting maximum returns on that investment. Done right, cloud computing offers major financial and operational benefits for companies.