How I Reduced Our AWS Cloudfront Data Transfer Cost from $1000+ to Under $400

When running an e-commerce platform, especially one hosting a vast amount of images for multiple websites, the costs associated with data transfer can quickly add up. As a <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sagar-chauhan/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Senior Technical Product Manager</a> (hands-on with day-to-day coding and contribute to features as an IC), working on a large scale distributed microservice architecture for an ecommerce platform, I was faced with the challenge of reducing our AWS cloudfront data transfer bill which was exceeding $1000+ per month. This was the challenge my team and I faced, but after some rigorous optimization and strategic changes, we managed to cut our AWS Cloudfront data transfer costs by over 60%. Here’s how we did it. <h1>The Challenge</h1> Our e-commerce platform served images that were dynamic in nature. Instead of storing multiple versions of each image for different sizes, our application logic would compress and modify each image on the fly. This meant we could maintain just a single file on AWS S3. It seemed like an efficient system, but it came with its own set of challenges. <a href="https://postscripts.medium.com/how-i-reduced-our-aws-cloudfront-data-transfer-cost-from-1000-to-under-400-674e02802751">Website</a>