Multi-AZ deployment is often essential for production workloads, but its use in non-production environments (e.g., development, test, QA) offers minimal value. These environments typically do not require high availability, yet still incur the full cost of redundant compute, storage, and data transfer. This results in unnecessary spend without operational benefit.
EC2 is billed based on instance runtime and size, with additional charges for inter-AZ data transfer and supporting infrastructure (e.g., EBS volumes, load balancers). Multi-AZ deployments double resource usage and introduce cross-AZ networking costs.
