Optimize Infrastructure for reduced AWS costs

[DecFox]

Our AWS costs are well within a safe budget but we would like to explore if we can reduce the expenses especially for high charges of services we are barely using or can switch to cheaper options.

The cost distribution (for financially intensive services) of the current OONI AWS infrastructure (using the AWS billing dashboard) is:

(Percentage of total cost reported in May 2024)

Elastic Compute Cloud
-- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud NatGateway: 39.6%
-- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud running Linux/UNIX: 15.7%
-- EBS: 3.37%

Elastic Load Balancing
-- Elastic Load Balancing - Application: 14.12%

Virtual Private Cloud
-- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud Public IPv4 Addresses: 10.59%

CloudHSM
-- AWS CloudHSM Hourly: 5.7%

We should look into the infra we currently use and try to minimise our expenses.

[hellais]

We have done quite a few important changes that optimize cost:

• Switched to smaller instances size for ECS
• Reduced the number of load balancers
• Switched over to a different networking setup that doesn't make use of NAT gateways

Future work is documented in the following issues:

• Switch to using parameter store for storing secrets #114
• Investigate high costs related to cloudwatch #85