I went along to Amazon AWS Cloud for startups and developers (http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/AWS-cloud-for-startups-developers-London/ http://aws.amazon.com/ab

I went along to Amazon AWS Cloud for startups and developers (http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/AWS-cloud-for-startups-developers-London/ http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/AWS-cloud-for-startups-devel...) last week in London. One very interesting talk was http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/optimizing-your-infrastructure-costs-on-aws http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/optimizing-your-... -- same slide deck, but different speaker in the London event. If there's a video available of this talk, try to watch it. On Reserved instances a one year Reserved instance is equivalent to 6 months running a non-reserved instance. So it starts to save you money after 6 months. Don't remember if this was a High, Medium or Low usage reserved instance. (slides 15, 16, 17) Other cost savings techniques I found interesting: * Using AWS ancillary services instead of building your own on EC2 servers saves a big chunk of cost (elastic load balancer, SQS, DynamoDB) -- slides 30-34 * Consider bidding for spot instances if you have data processing requirements that fit those usecases (Map/Reduce jobs for example). This will save you heaps. -- slides 21-30 * It's really all about fitting your usage graph to the right combination of EC2 instances, so something long-term to handle the average traffic. A medium resource to handle the daily peak loads, and something extra on hand to handle a short but sharp spike in traffic. And spot instances to push down the per hour resource cost in batch processing. (Disclaimer, I work for LOVEFiLM, an Amazon company, but not involved in AWS side of things)