Cost pillar often underweighted by SAA, but Pro recognizes it competes with Reliability/Performance. Optimization requires unit economics thinking not just total dollar reduction.
Core strategies:
- Savings Plans vs RI vs On-Demand: SP most flexible (3-year Compute/DDB), RI most aggressive discount, On-Demand pay-per-use
- Spot: 90% off, interruption tolerance (batch, CI, rendering), blend with on-demand for durability
- Right-sizing: Compute Optimizer flags over-provisioned instances, CloudWatch metrics reveal utilization
- Data transfer: VPC Endpoint (free S3/DDB from private subnet), CloudFront (cheaper egress), same-AZ communication
- Storage tiering: S3 Intelli