You've got it backwards - which is to some extent why you have this problem: If you're fully utilizing your instances, you're working from the bottom of the pr

You've got it backwards - which is to some extent why you have this problem: If you're fully utilizing your instances, you're working from the bottom of the pricing up, and all these things (3x redundancy, etc) are marginal costs of doing business because you're successful. What you're opting out of is the data-center workers, the sysadmins, the operators, and the expertise that comes with if it offered you value. Your hundreds of lines of CDK are people you're not employing to write them (it's your job I guess?), and applying the AWS systems and services to do that work for you - given you've chosen CDK, I have to assume you've bought into AWS anyhow, and someone in the chain sees the value extracted or savings approach. Where AWS burns you is when you don't know what you're doing - you have a PHP app, so you put in on an instance, you need it reliable so you have two, you need shared storage so you put it on EFS, and so on and so forth. If you're at the other end of the spectrum, and you want to buy the level of reliability and redundancy you get from three of the smallest instances in AWS spread in three AZ's, you're looking at a six figure investment. So yes, it's pricy if you use it like you use the desktop under you (8 hours a day, usually at 20% load), but you can also run millions of hits for pennies if you learn that most of what you're doing is overhead that gets built into, well, serverless.