3 min
AWS Observability Costs: Cardinality Budgets & FinOps Limits
CloudWatch Logs Insights bills $0.005 per GB scanned and high-cardinality custom metrics multiply costs. Cardinality budgets, sampling rules, and FinOps fixes.
Palaniappan PTagged
cost-optimization
- Tagged articles
- 105
Palaniappan P
16 min
Bedrock Provisioned Throughput vs On-Demand: Break-Even Math for Production Workloads (2026)
Most teams buy Bedrock Provisioned Throughput too early or too late. This is the break-even math, by token volume, model family, and traffic shape, that we use in real FinOps engagements to decide which Bedrock pricing mode wins.
Kevin W.
14 min
AWS Lambda S3 Files: POSIX Mount for S3, ~13× Cheaper Than EFS — and the 6 Limits to Know
As of July 2026, Lambda S3 Files still mounts S3 as POSIX via NFS, at roughly S3 Standard storage rates vs EFS for large files. Versioning is required, IAM is s3files:*, capacity providers are incompatible, and a ~60s write-back window breaks naive ports.
Manoj V.
10 min
Amazon Redshift Serverless vs Provisioned: Which Is Right for Your Workload?
Serverless RPUs vs Provisioned RA3 is still not an automatic call. July 2026 refresh: base 4 to 1024 RPUs, Max RPU-hours, AI-driven scaling, and when RI wins.
Palaniappan P
14 min
Amazon OpenSearch Service: Architecture Patterns and Cost Optimization
Amazon OpenSearch Service powers search, log analytics, and time-series workloads on AWS. This post covers the architecture patterns and cost levers that matter most in production.
Palaniappan P
10 min
AWS NAT Gateway Billing: Why You Are Paying for Ghost Infrastructure
An idle NAT Gateway in us-east-1 costs $36.50/month before any traffic: $32.85 in hours plus $3.65 for the public IPv4. A Regional NAT Gateway across three AZs still bills three hours, $109.50 idle.
Kevin W.
15 min
EC2 Spot Instance Selection: A Data-Driven Approach to 60–90% Cost Reduction
Cheapest Spot pool is often the unstable one. July 2026: price-capacity-optimized + attribute-based selection, stability scoring, and interruption handling, before you chase $/hr.
Kevin W.
10 min
AWS EMR: Serverless vs EC2 vs EKS — When to Use Each
EMR Serverless vs EC2 vs EKS for Spark. July 2026 refresh: Spot limits, cold start, Iceberg on all three, and a decision matrix for intermittent vs 24/7 jobs.
Palaniappan P
12 min
Amazon Athena Cost Optimization: Partition Pruning, Compression, and Iceberg Tables
Athena still bills ~$5/TB scanned (or Capacity Reservations by DPU). July 2026 refresh covering partitions, Parquet/Iceberg, workgroups, and when provisioned capacity wins.
Palaniappan P
13 min
Cloud Cost Optimization in 2026: 8 Modern Strategies Beyond the Basics
The standard cost optimization checklist no longer cuts it. These 8 modern strategies, from unit economics to automated Savings Plans and cost observability, reflect how engineering teams are actually managing cloud spend in 2026.
Kevin W.
6 min
AWS Graviton: The Complete Cost Optimization Guide for Production Workloads
AWS Graviton processors deliver 20-40% cost savings and better performance-per-watt. Covers the migration path, performance benchmarks, and production deployment patterns.
Palaniappan P
8 min
How to Deploy EKS with Karpenter for Cost-Optimized Autoscaling
Karpenter replaces Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler with intelligent bin-packing and just-in-time node provisioning. This guide covers setup, consolidation, cost optimization, and production patterns for EKS clusters.
Palaniappan P