How to Minimize the Costs of Running AWS EC2 Instances Using Terraform

Let’s optimize AWS infrastructure usage and save some money

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Introduction

Reducing running costs for a business is always interesting, especially when it comes to the variable costs that depend on the actual usage of the services.

Running AWS EC2 instances 24/7 for hosting and running software applications on testing environments is relatively expensive and the costs for running these instances all the time may exceed the budget allocated to the project.

Cleaning up an AWS account and terminating all unneeded EC2 nodes is the first step in reducing the costs of running EC2 instances. However, it is not the only thing that can be done to reduce costs. In most cases even with the cleanup, many EC2 instances are still needed for the software development process. The exact number of the needed instances is dependent on the project size and the number of contributors or teams on the project.

Most of these instances will be used as testing environments during the development of the software, and it will be heavily used by the engineers during the working hours to deploy new versions of the source code and test the new features of the applications. However, these environments are less likely…