Who hasn’t jumped into the deep end of the cloud by now? Something like 94% of organizations use cloud in one form or another and, every year, more IT budget goes to cloud. That progression makes it imperative for you to understand the ins and outs of cloud spending with any cloud provider you use — Amazon, Google, Microsoft — even Oracle or IBM. You’re in a position where you need to get the most value out of every dollar, and that’s not easy. Let’s consider AWS for a minute. AWS pricing optimization is a discipline unto itself with many proven practices, frameworks, models, and even dedicated tools (like NetApp® Cloud Insights). AWS, like other clouds, has many levers to pull and knobs to turn that increase and decrease costs. It has many choices you can make that have ongoing implications on spending, and many ways that simple misconfigurations or misuse can add up to cost overruns over time. At NetApp, we’re here to help, so let’s solve some of those AWS cost challenges. In this post, we’re going to give you an understanding of AWS pricing models that can reduce your costs. We’ll also provide 10 reasons why your cloud bill might be different than expected. Finally, we’ll show you a powerful way to reduce your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) costs by using NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP®. By the time you’ve finished reading this post, you’ll have new ideas and new resources to drive down your AWS costs — leaving new room in your budget to adapt and innovate. Ready to jump into the deep end?