For years, EC2 has been the backbone of the public cloud: flexible, elastic, instantly available compute. But with that flexibility comes an uncomfortable truth—one we often ignore because re-architecture feels harder than overpaying:

EC2 is a convenience layer wrapped around structural inefficiencies.

Not because AWS is malicious, but because general-purpose compute is inherently wasteful when we try to bend it toward every workload pattern.

1. Overprovisioning Is the Default, Not the Exception

Most EC2 instances run at 10–20% CPU utilization in real-world environments.
Why?
Because engineering teams design for peak load, and autoscaling—while powerful—isn’t instantaneous.

So we pad our capacity, and AWS is happy to let us.

2. Instance Flexibility = Architectural Rigidity

The promise of EC2 is that it gives you any machine you want.
But that flexibility often stops teams from evolving beyond:

• monolithic services

• snowflake VMs

• manual maintenance patterns

• slow deployment cycles

In other words, EC2 can fossilize legacy architectures.

Containers, managed platforms, and serverless reduce waste by design. EC2 leaves the choice—and therefore the inefficiency—up to us.

3. Pricing Models Reinforce Overuse

Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Spot Instances—the “choose your own adventure” of cloud discounts.
But these discounts often encourage:

• committing to capacity you don’t actually need

• locking into instance families

• optimizing for AWS billing instead of workload efficiency

You save money while still overspending.

4. Networking + Storage Overhead Adds Silent Cost

EC2 isn’t just compute.
It’s:

• EBS I/O

• ENA networking

• snapshots

• NAT gateways

• data transfer out

You don’t pay just for the VM—you pay for the ecosystem orbiting around it.

5. Elasticity (Ironically) Has Limits

Cold starts for ASGs can still take minutes.
Large instance families can be capacity-constrained in your region.
And scaling down safely requires engineering work that few teams prioritize.

So workloads “scale,” but not fluidly—and the inefficiencies accumulate.

The Takeaway

EC2 isn’t a bad product.
It’s a brilliant general-purpose substrate.

But general-purpose compute guarantees general-purpose waste.

Today, the biggest cost savings don’t come from optimizing EC2—they come from avoiding it wherever possible.