AWS provides many opportunities for cost savings, yet teams often find themselves overspending by defaulting to always-on instances or container services when more efficient options are available.
- 📍 Serve static content without dedicated instances
👉 Example: Use a CloudFront distribution to deliver static assets directly from S3. - 📍 Generate dynamic content per request
👉 Example: Leverage Lambda@Edge on the origin side to dynamically populate static templates served from S3. - 📍 Pre-generate content at the event origin
👉 Example: Use a Lambda function, step function or container task to update static templates in S3 only when dynamic data changes, reducing unnecessary compute. - 📍 Avoid heavy runtimes for event-driven compute
👉 Lambda functions are most efficient with minimal startup overhead. Select your runtime carefully (see my recent post on custom lambda runtimes for tips).
While these optimizations generally fall under “serverless,” serverless itself is not a single paradigm but rather a diverse set of architectural techniques. Successful serverless architectures require careful planning to ensure your infrastructure performs work only when necessary.
📎 Example Use Case:
Imagine you need to send a daily bulk email to users on a social network, providing a snapshot of their network activity.
A straightforward but costly approach would be running an intensive process to query each user’s social graph and generate an email template. This would heavily strain your APIs during the bulk send, necessitating dedicated compute resources to handle the load, potentially disrupting the user experience.
Instead, consider shifting the workload to the event origin. By processing and storing the required data incrementally as each activity occurs within the social graph, you can reduce the load during the email send and significantly cut costs while enhancing efficiency.
In short, event-driven, on-demand compute models can drastically reduce costs, but they require rethinking when and how your application performs work. With a strategic approach, you can achieve a leaner, more cost-effective AWS setup that scales with your needs.
