How can I reduce AWS costs?

Last updated: March 3, 2026

Context

Using Porter to manage your infrastructure on AWS can lead to increased costs due to hosting your own EC2 instances. While some expenses are inherent to this setup, there are several optimization strategies you can implement to reduce your AWS expenses while maintaining your cluster performance.

Answer

Here are the key strategies to optimize your AWS costs on Porter:

  1. Enable Cost Optimization
    Turn on the Cost Optimization feature for your cluster. This feature automatically manages your node groups to reduce costs. You can learn more about this feature in the Porter documentation. If you purchase reserved instances from AWS, make sure to select the appropriate instance families in this feature so only those instances are used by the optimization.

  2. Migrate to ARM-based instances
    ARM-based instances are generally cheaper than x86 instances. Consider migrating your applications to support ARM-based cluster nodes. You can find guidance on resolving any compatibility issues in this knowledge base article.

  3. Right-size your applications
    Review your applications' resource allocation using the Metrics tab in Porter. Check if CPU and RAM are over-provisioned and adjust the resource requests to match your applications' actual needs. This prevents paying for unused resources.

  4. Implement ECR lifecycle policies
    Set up lifecycle policies for your Elastic Container Registry to automatically clean up old images. However, create lifecycle policies based on the number of image revisions rather than dates. Date-based policies can cause application failures if an image version gets deleted while still in use by running applications.

  5. Use spot instances for appropriate workloads
    For fault-tolerant workloads that can handle interruptions, consider using spot node groups. Spot instances can provide significant cost savings compared to on-demand instances.

These optimization strategies can help significantly reduce your AWS costs while maintaining the performance and reliability of your applications on Porter.