FinOps
26 posts
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API Gateway: REST vs HTTP API cost (2026)
API Gateway HTTP APIs are 3.5x cheaper per request until the payload passes 1.5 MB, where the 512 KB metering increment flips it.
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Cut Amazon Bedrock inference cost (2026)
Bedrock batch inference is 50% off, cache reads 75% off, and AWS states the two cannot be combined. Plus the caching failure that raises no error.
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EKS Auto Mode: the third bill (2026)
EKS Auto Mode adds a management fee that varies by instance type, on top of EC2 and the control plane. And split cost allocation does not divide it.
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AWS Budgets vs Cost Anomaly Detection (2026)
They catch different failures, and only Budgets sees AWS Marketplace charges. Detection lags, monitor types, and what to run.
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How AWS credits actually apply (2026)
Soonest to expire first, largest charge first, biggest account first. Plus what credits will not cover, including Marketplace.
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EKS extended support: $0.10 to $0.60 (2026)
EKS extended support is six times the control plane rate, on a published date, enabled by default. Once a cluster is in it you cannot turn it off.
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AWS Cost Categories: split charge limits (2026)
Cost categories apply retroactively to the start of the month. Split charge results never reach the CUR or Cost Explorer.
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Does consolidated billing save money? (2026)
AWS's worked example puts consolidated billing's volume tiering at about 4%. Commitment sharing is worth far more than that.
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Secrets Manager vs Parameter Store (2026)
AWS prices 1,500 secrets at $604.50 a month in Secrets Manager. Standard Parameter Store parameters are free. Plus a tier change you cannot undo.
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AWS Cost Optimization Hub: the gaps (2026)
EKS spend counts toward Cost Optimization Hub's efficiency score but generates no recommendations, so a wasteful cluster raises the number.
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RDS extended support: priced per vCPU (2026)
RDS extended support scales with instance size, unlike EKS, and runs three years. Disabling it on a lapsed database upgrades the engine immediately.
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Do Lambda cold starts cost money? (2026)
Since 1 August 2025 every Lambda is billed for INIT, the cold start phase. What changed, how to measure it, what does not fix it.
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What Route 53 actually costs (2026)
Route 53 hosted zones are not prorated, alias queries to AWS services are free, and a Resolver endpoint is about $182 a month.
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EC2 Capacity Reservations: unused cost (2026)
An EC2 Capacity Reservation bills at full On-Demand whether used or not, and the idle half arrives as UnusedBox. Plus who pays when it is shared.
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DynamoDB on-demand vs provisioned (2026)
AWS publishes the DynamoDB break-even: on-demand costs less below 35% utilisation. Plus the console switch that deletes your auto scaling.
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Are AWS Glue crawlers free? (2026)
No. Glue crawlers bill $0.44 per DPU-hour with a 10-minute minimum per crawl, so an hourly schedule costs about $1,285 a year.
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Savings Plans: coverage vs utilization (2026)
Savings Plans coverage and utilization move in opposite directions. What each low value means, and the documented order AWS applies discounts in.
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Does a stopped EC2 instance cost money? (2026)
A stopped EC2 instance bills no compute. The EBS volume, any Elastic IP and any Savings Plan under it do, and hibernating costs more.
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AWS CloudTrail pricing and costs (2026)
CloudTrail's first copy of management events is free; the second costs $2.00 per 100,000, twenty times the rate of S3 data events.
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AWS KMS key pricing at scale (2026)
A rotated key costs $3 a month, not $1. And S3 Bucket Keys cut KMS request charges by up to 99% with no code change.
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Why Cost Explorer and your CUR differ (2026)
Same dataset, three totals. The six documented causes, which number you owe, and what Cost Explorer charges per request.
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Amortized vs unblended cost in AWS (2026)
Five CUR cost columns, one right answer per question. When to use amortized, when unblended, and why blended cost is never the answer.
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What AWS Config actually costs (2026)
You are billed per configuration item, and AWS confirms one is recorded even when no resource is created. Churn is the driver.
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Limit what one Athena query can scan (2026)
Athena's per-query limit cancels; the per-workgroup limit only alerts. Cancelled queries are still billed and leave debris.
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What CloudWatch Logs actually cost (2026)
The CloudWatch Logs Infrequent Access class halves ingestion only, removes metric filters and alarms, and can never be changed after creation.
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Transit Gateway pricing and costs (2026)
Transit Gateway attachment hours land on the VPC owner, not the gateway owner, and three types bill three different accounts.