Julian's AWS Dollar Dazzlers
Dec 20 2024
Studying for my Solution Architect Associate Certification I got a re-education in the constantly updating AWS product line. These are my latest dollar dazzlers - cheap, exceptionally useful product offerings to help having your cloud computing costs take less of a bite out of the old hip pocket. Because the only thing I love more than petabyte-scale computing is an old fashioned bargain
S3 Select
From deep storage archiving to budget web site serving, S3 is for me the most versatile and cost effective AWS product. With S3 Select you can run simple queries against CSV or JSON objects - so if you aggregated and dumped a very large log file for instance, you can query it later from within S3. No Athena, no Cloudwatch, no setup at all.
EventBridge
EventBridge is a swiss army knife of event driven systems. Now offering scheduling, event filtering and fan-out, it can be a simple replacement for a complex chain of SQS/SNS/MSK pipes. The ease of which it is configured is the driver for me because time is money
Hibernated EC2 Instances
Likely a pattern as old as the hills but - especially for small enterprises with on-prem - hibernated instances are one cheap way to have ready disaster recovery. Hibernated instances charge only the EBS storage - so are a cost effective way to do fast and furious failover.
This one comes with caveats - you could achieve the same thing with Fargate, and this solution could easily fall victim to 'out of sight, out of mind' neglect - you would need to keep the machines up to date.
IPv6 EIP
Now that Elastic IPs set you back a cool $3.60 a month whether attached or not, it's well worth updating to use IPv6, the plentiful, free alternative. You can manually assign an IPv6 address out of a CIDR to an ENI, pocketing the savings.