How to Determine Excessive Use of Your Amazon S3 Bucket

You’ve noticed a significant increase in your AWS bill for an Amazon S3 bucket, which primarily stores user avatars and photos. Here’s how you can investigate unusual data transfer rates:

Investigating the Issue

• Access Log Analysis: Enable access logs on your S3 to track file activity (check out Amazon’s guide for guidance).

Case Study Insight

Someone else faced a similar issue: an S3 bucket containing only profile pictures was costing much more due to hidden behaviors in ORM packages used with their database—inadvertently triggering updates and additional data loads when performing simple user logins. In this case, the culprit included large image URLs being downloaded unnecessarily during these operations.

By monitoring your S3 bucket’s access logs closely or analyzing application code for unintended behaviors like in the ORM example above, you can identify unexpected sources of data transfer and take appropriate measures to control costs effectively.