Questions[aws-cost-explorer](server)

In my current AWS account, I have only one instance in Us-West -2. I do not have a ELB. The Elastic IP is in the same region. It does not specify any availability zone. but wrt RDS, this instance is connected to in a different availability zone of the same region and it also access few S3 buckets created in other region.. Is it why I am getting charged? any thoughts on this will be appreciated.

I have may aws ec2 instances running in dev account and most of the instances i see cpu utlization doesn't go most of the time more than 5% . For example even in one of the kubernetes cluster where kafka is running it is not exceeding 5 or max 6% of cpu utlization when we used t3.xlarge (16gb ram and 4vcpu) machine for kafka cluster setup.

So my question is there an way to find out if i am really fully utlizing the instances for which we have opted for so that i can downgrade my instances type to low cost one if it is not fully utlized. I saw aws compute optimizer but that is saying most of the instances are optimized only 1 or 2 it shows as not optimized with under utlized.

Also most of the application like may be kafka are by default requesting 8gb ram and good cpu for better usage but the cloud watch chart doesn't actually show as if its fully utlized.

Hence is there any way to tacle this and reduce the ec2 costing in aws?

Into "Cost Explorer Monthly costs by service" report I saw $300 for S3 for certain month. But when I tried to drill-down into the bill for this month, I saw just $4 for the "Simple Storage Service". So I'm not sure I understand how I can investigate S3 cost.

TIA, Vitaly

Setup

We have an ECS cluster with 2 services (called portal-ECS-service and graph-ECS-service). Each have an ALB (portal-ALB and graph-ALB respectively).

The setup is this:

End user <-> portal-ALB <-> portal-ECS-service <-> graph-ALB <-> graph-ECS-service

Notes

• everything is in the same VPC
• graph-ALB has Scheme: internal
• when communicating from portal-ECS-service to graph-ALB we use as the endpoint graph-ALB.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com

Problem

We pay a very large amount (~$50 / day) in DataTransfer-Out-Bytes.

Question

I've read that high DataTransfer-Out-Bytes costs can often be solved by using Internal IP instead of public DNS endpoint.

Is it possible to communicate to an ALB internally without going through the public DNS endpoint? In our case, can we have portal-ECS-service <-> graph-ALB communication without paying high DataTransfer-Out-Bytes costs?

Thank you very much in advance.