After cleaning up all our unneeded instances and optimising our architecture, we finally realised that our developer stacks and test environments didn’t need to

After cleaning up all our unneeded instances and optimising our architecture, we finally realised that our developer stacks and test environments didn’t need to run 24/7, which has so far been the biggest single cost saving we’ve implemented. By only running stacks from 8am-8pm then stopping everything, we’re getting a 50% saving on our instance costs. If a developer needs a stack they can still launch a new one or start their existing one. We also moved a few test stacks to use single AZ modes instead of multi AZ for another significant saving. Dialing down our snapshots in non production environments was also a great help to cut our costs.