Reducing costs of an AWS infrastructure. Results opposite to expected.

Hi, Along with the EC2 instances, volumes and snapshots there may be other services that are contributing to the cost. The best way to dive deep is to use Cost Explorer. Filter on Service as "EC2-Other" and Group by "Usage Type". This filter will show you the detailed costs and you should be able to take action accordingly. Here is the link to use Cost Explorer. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide/ce-what-is.html

A good place to start is to monitor your costs within AWS

The best tool would be a deep dive into cost explorer, in future tagging will give you a more granular view.

Hello,

As @AWS-User-Chai metioned, using Cost Explorer will allow you to investigate what service or action is driving the increase in cost.

One 'Usage Type' related to the 'EC2-Other' service that may be driving up daily costs based on the information that you provided is EBS:SnapshotUsage if the snapshots that you deleted were from EC2 instances that still exist and are actively backed up.

During the initial snapshot of an Amazon EBS volume a full copy of the data is stored in Amazon S3, and subsequent snapshots only contain incremental changes. This means, that if the initial snapshot was deleted, the next snapshot may have a higher cost as any data not present in the incremental snapshots will need to be backed up again. Snapshot costs should return to normal once this is completed.

Additional information on Amazon EC2 Backup and Recovery can be found in the AWS Prescriptive Guidance documentation.

Amazon EBS provides the ability to create snapshots (backups) of any EBS volume. A snapshot is a base feature for creating backups of your EBS volumes. A snapshot takes a copy of the EBS volume and places it in Amazon S3, where it is stored redundantly in multiple Availability Zones. The initial snapshot is a full copy of the volume; ongoing snapshots store incremental block-level changes only. See the Amazon EC2 documentation for details on how to create Amazon EBS snapshots.

If you find that the cost still remains higher than expected, or if you are unable to determine which service or usage type is leading to the increased cost, opening an AWS Support Case for 'Account and Billing' will allow a member of the AWS Support team to provide more specific information into your costs and usage.