Designing Cost-Optimized Development Environments on AWS_ Practical Strategies for Minimising Cloud Spend

This paper presents practical, reproducible strategies for significantly reducing the cost of AWS development environments by accepting limited availability trade-offs in exchange for substantial savings. Through single-AZ deployments, use of VPC Gateway Endpoints, automated scheduling of EC2 and RDS resources, and network consolidation, the study demonstrates achievable monthly cost reductions of up to 81%. The work includes detailed methodology, cost modeling, Terraform examples, and analysis showing how intentional architectural simplification can make cloud development environments both efficient and financially sustainable.