AWS Config cost optimization: Strategies for efficient cloud spending

When managing your AWS infrastructure, AWS Config plays a vital role in tracking resource configurations and ensuring compliance. However, without proper optimization, this essential service can become a significant contributor to your cloud bill. Let’s explore practical strategies to optimize your AWS Config costs while maintaining its valuable compliance and governance benefits.

Understanding AWS Config pricing structure

AWS Config’s pricing model revolves around two primary components:

1. Configuration items (CIs):

   • Continuous mode: $0.003 per configuration item
   • Periodic mode: $0.012 per configuration item

2. Rule evaluations:

   Evaluations	Cost per Evaluation
   First 100,000	$0.001
   100,001–500,000	$0.0008
   500,001+	$0.0005

This tiered pricing structure encourages consolidation - the more evaluations you perform, the lower your per-evaluation cost becomes. For example, tracking 10,000 configuration items in continuous mode would cost $30/month, while 50,000 rule evaluations would add another $50/month to your bill.

Key cost optimization strategies

1. Choose the right recording mode

The recording mode you select can significantly impact your AWS Config costs:

• Continuous mode ($0.003 per item): Records configuration changes in real-time
• Periodic mode ($0.012 per item): Records changes at specified intervals

Best practice: Reserve continuous mode for critical resources that require real-time monitoring and use periodic mode sparingly for less critical resources. Many organizations mistakenly use periodic mode for everything, not realizing it costs four times more per configuration item than continuous mode. This strategic approach can reduce your configuration item costs by up to 75%.

2. Optimize rule evaluations

AWS Config rules evaluate your resources against predefined or custom compliance standards. To optimize these costs:

• Consolidate evaluations: Aggregate evaluations across accounts and regions to reach higher volume tiers and benefit from lower per-evaluation pricing. For instance, consolidating 600,000 evaluations costs $322.50 versus $410 if split into separate accounts.
• Review rule frequency: Adjust evaluation frequency based on the criticality of the resource. Not every rule needs to run continuously. For example, checking S3 bucket policies might warrant daily checks, while reviewing unused IAM roles could be a weekly task.
• Remove redundant rules: Regularly audit your rules to identify and eliminate duplicative or unnecessary evaluations. It’s surprisingly common to find multiple rules checking similar conditions.

3. Leverage conformance packs effectively

Conformance packs allow you to deploy a collection of AWS Config rules and remediation actions as a single entity. While they follow the same pricing structure as individual rules, they offer management efficiency that can lead to cost savings through:

• Simplified deployment: Deploy multiple rules as a single unit
• Standardized compliance: Apply consistent standards across accounts
• Reduced management overhead: Manage related rules collectively

For example, instead of creating and managing 20 separate security rules, you can deploy the AWS Operational Best Practices for Security conformance pack, saving significant administration time while maintaining the same cost structure.

4. Implement strategic resource recording

Not all resources require the same level of configuration tracking. Consider:

• Selective resource recording: Configure AWS Config to record only the resource types relevant to your compliance and governance needs. For most organizations, this means excluding temporary or high-volume resources like CloudWatch Events or Lambda execution logs.
• Global resource optimization: For global resources like IAM users or roles, record them in a single region to avoid duplicate recording charges. Many organizations inadvertently pay multiple times for the same global resource configurations.

Common inefficiencies to avoid

Several common practices can unnecessarily inflate your AWS Config costs:

1. Overuse of periodic recording mode: Paying $0.012 per item instead of $0.003 per item for resources that don’t need it. If you’re monitoring 50,000 resources, this mistake alone costs an extra $450 per month.
2. Fragmented rule evaluations: Failing to consolidate evaluations across accounts, missing volume discount opportunities. At scale, consolidation can reduce your per-evaluation cost by 50%.
3. Recording unnecessary resource types: Tracking configurations for resources that don’t require compliance monitoring. Most organizations only need to monitor 40-60% of their resource types.
4. Duplicate global resource recording: Recording global resources in multiple regions, resulting in redundant charges. This common oversight can double or triple your charges for these resources.

Monitoring and optimization tools

To effectively manage your AWS Config costs, leverage these tools:

• AWS Cost Explorer: Analyze your AWS Config spending patterns and identify optimization opportunities. This tool is particularly useful when combined with proper aws cloud cost management tools to get a comprehensive view of your spending.
• AWS CloudTrail: Audit AWS Config activity to identify inefficient usage patterns. CloudTrail can help you track which resources generate the most configuration items, allowing targeted optimization.
• AWS Budgets: Set up alerts to notify you when AWS Config costs exceed predefined thresholds. Proactive alerting can prevent cost surprises at month-end.

Real-world optimization example

Consider a mid-sized organization with:

• 10,000 configuration items
• 50,000 rule evaluations
• 15,000 conformance pack evaluations

Their monthly AWS Config bill totals $95. By implementing the following optimizations:

1. Moving 40% of resources from periodic to continuous recording (saving $3.60 per 1,000 items)
2. Consolidating rule evaluations across accounts (moving into a higher discount tier)
3. Eliminating redundant rules (reducing evaluation count by 15%)

They reduced their monthly costs by 35%, saving over $33 per month or nearly $400 annually. While $400 might seem modest, these same principles apply proportionally to larger environments where savings can reach tens of thousands of dollars.

Integration with broader AWS cost management

AWS Config optimization should be part of your comprehensive AWS cost management strategy. When combined with other optimization efforts like optimized ebs volume sizing and performance tuning aws, you can achieve significant overall savings.

For container-based workloads, understanding the cost implications of different orchestration services like ecs and eks can further enhance your cost optimization efforts. The right container orchestration choice alone can reduce your infrastructure costs by 20-30% depending on your workload patterns.

Automated cost optimization

Managing AWS Config costs manually can be time-consuming. Consider leveraging automated solutions like Hykell that can:

1. Continuously monitor your AWS Config usage
2. Identify cost optimization opportunities
3. Recommend specific actions to reduce costs
4. Implement optimizations automatically

Automated solutions are particularly valuable for organizations with complex, multi-account AWS environments where manual optimization would be prohibitively time-intensive. For example, a financial services company with 200+ AWS accounts reduced their Config costs by 43% in the first month after implementing automated optimizations.

Conclusion

Optimizing AWS Config costs doesn’t mean sacrificing its valuable compliance and governance capabilities. By implementing strategic recording modes, consolidating rule evaluations, and eliminating inefficiencies, you can significantly reduce your AWS Config spending while maintaining robust configuration monitoring.

For organizations looking to maximize their cloud cost efficiency, combining AWS Config optimization with broader cost management strategies can yield substantial savings. Consider leveraging automated solutions that can identify and implement optimization opportunities across your entire AWS environment, potentially reducing your overall cloud costs by up to 40%.