Seeking Cost Saving options For ALB with Autoscaling

Based on your current setup and usage, there are several strategies you can consider to optimize and reduce your AWS costs:

1. Application Load Balancer (ALB) Optimization: The ALB seems to be a significant cost factor. Consider using a single Application Load Balancer for multiple applications if possible. Also, review your ALB configuration to ensure you're not over-provisioning.

2. Auto Scaling Refinement: Fine-tune your Auto Scaling policies to more closely match your traffic patterns. This could potentially reduce the number of instances running during off-peak hours. Consider using more granular scaling policies based on metrics like CPU utilization, request count, or custom application metrics.

3. Instance Type Evaluation: Analyze if t3.large instances are the most cost-effective for your workload. You might be able to use a different instance family or size that provides better price-performance for your specific needs. AWS Compute Optimizer can help identify if your instances are over-provisioned.

4. Spot Instances: For non-critical workloads or batch processing, consider using Spot Instances in your Auto Scaling group. They can offer significant cost savings compared to On-Demand instances.

5. RDS Optimization: With 60% average CPU usage, your RDS instance might be slightly over-provisioned. Consider testing a smaller instance size or exploring Aurora Serverless if your workload has variable demand.

6. Data Transfer Cost Reduction: Review your data transfer patterns and ensure you're making the most of CloudFront. Optimize your caching strategies and TTLs to reduce origin fetches.

7. VPC Cost Analysis: Examine your VPC usage, particularly NAT Gateway usage if applicable. Consider using VPC endpoints for AWS services to reduce data transfer costs.

8. AWS Savings Plans: While you don't want to reserve the EC2 instances, consider Compute Savings Plans which provide flexibility across instance families, sizes, and even some AWS services.

9. CloudWatch and Monitoring: Use AWS Cost Explorer and CloudWatch to continuously monitor your usage and identify cost anomalies or optimization opportunities.

10. Serverless Options: For certain components of your application, consider if serverless options like AWS Lambda or Fargate could be more cost-effective, especially if you have variable traffic patterns.

Remember to test any changes in a non-production environment first to ensure they don't negatively impact your application's performance or reliability. Regularly review and refine your setup as your traffic patterns and application needs evolve.
Sources
Community | AWS cost optimization: Top tips and best practices to reduce your bill
Community | EC2 cost optimization:15 ways to save on Amazon EC2
Overview of cost optimization - Cost Modeling Data Lakes for Beginners
AWS Auto Scaling Features

The re:Post Agent is good but misses one specific thing:

How much of your content is static? Serving static content from a web server farm wastes capacity (all capacity - load balancer, servers, etc.).

Instead: Put the static content into S3. Less storage cost and S3 will scale automatically to deal with large-scale requests at no extra cost to you - you're still paying for the data transfer (but you will anyway coming from EC2/load balancer) but you don't have to pay for more instances and more load balancer capacity to deliver content.