Sheba.xyz

An online service marketplace in Bangladesh. We reviewed its AWS account, then fixed what the review found.

The result

$12,000 to $6,000 a monthMonthly AWS bill, before the review and after phase one

After phase one. Projected: about $4,500 a month

The last bar is a projection for work still to come, not a bill.

Reviewed the account to find where the money went.
Consolidated under-used EC2 instances, removed stopped ones, and applied Savings Plans and Reserved Instances.
Removed redundant load balancers, moved EBS from gp2 to gp3 and cleaned up old snapshots.
Moved Aurora MySQL to RDS MySQL with AWS Database Migration Service.
Added Amazon CloudWatch billing alerts, so a bill cannot run over unnoticed.

Compute
- Amazon EC2, consolidated
- Savings Plans
- Reserved Instances
- Application Load Balancer
Storage
- Amazon EBS, gp2 to gp3
- EBS and RDS snapshots cleaned up
Database
- Amazon RDS for MySQL, from Aurora MySQL
- AWS Database Migration Service
Network and certificates
- Amazon Route 53
- Amazon VPC
- AWS Certificate Manager
Cost control
- Amazon CloudWatch billing alerts

First monthThe bill was 50% lower within the first month.
Cost visibilityBilling alerts and monitoring now show spend as it grows.
Resource useConsolidating instances and storage made better use of resources without hurting performance.
Projected monthly billProjectedLater work is projected to bring the bill to about $4,500 a month, 62.5% lower overall.