AWS Best Practices for Cost Optimization
Myth: Your AWS bill is a function of how many customers you have.
Fact: Your AWS bill is a function of how many engineers you have.
Corey Quinn
“If you’re moving to the cloud primarily to save money, you’re going to be terribly surprised by the outcome,” is a fairly common and widespread phrase in my team’s conversations.
While we always agree on the benefits of the cloud such as ease of use, flexibility, and so on, there needs to be a rethink of how money is spent in this environment.
Simply reusing your existing on-premises practices could cost a lot and likely discourage you from making a transition to the cloud.
To avoid this, and not to lose all the benefits of the cloud due to a bad “copy and paste” strategy, spend some time discovering the different peculiarities of the platform and the integrated tools, especially when they are connected to the expense of the budget.
In this article, we’ll share some tips based on our experience with AWS cost optimization
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Here are the Best Practices identified to optimize costs and allow customers, through the right partners, to direct their resources to other investments.
1. Exercise of cloud financial management Cloud adoption enables technology teams to innovate quickly through shorter infrastructure approval, procurement, and deployment cycles. Adding value and improving business requires a new approach to financial management in the cloud. This approach is cloud financial management, and it builds capacity across the organization by implementing organization-wide skills, programs, resources, and processes.
2. Effective Reserved Instance Management Purchasing Reserved Instances can be considered an easy way to reduce costs, but it depends a lot on how the instances are specifically managed. Effective management refers to calculating, even approximately, all variables before making a purchase and then monitoring usage during the lifecycle of an instance reservation.
3. Resizing EC2 instances. The purpose of scaling is to match the size of the instances to the workloads. You need to analyze usage metrics to find opportunities to move workloads to different families (other than “Generic Purpose”) that best fit their needs.
4. Delete Outdated Snapshots Snapshots are an efficient way to back up data to an EBS volume or to an S3 storage bucket because they back up only the data that has changed since the last snapshot to avoid duplication in the S3 bucket. The snapshot saves thousands of dollars because the most recent snapshot ensures that your data will be recovered if something goes wrong.
5. Awareness of expenses and usage. The cloud enables more flexibility and agility by eliminating the manual processes and time associated with provisioning on-premises infrastructure, including identifying hardware specifications, negotiating price quotes, managing purchase orders, planning shipments, and deploying resources.
6. Affordable resources. Using instances that fit your workload is also critical to optimizing or reducing costs. Choosing the appropriate service can reduce usage and costs; for example, the AWS Cloud Front service can minimize data transfer or eliminate costs altogether, while using Amazon Aurora on RDS can remove high database licensing costs.
7. Supply and demand resource management. Pay as you go prices. One of the great advantages of moving to the cloud is that you only pay for what you need. It allows you to provide resources based on workload demand when you need them, eliminating the need for costly and time-consuming unnecessary provisioning. Demand can also be managed by using techniques such as throttling, buffering, or queuing to ease demand and meet it with fewer resources.
8. Optimization over time. Implementing new features or resource types can optimize your workload incrementally and with minimal effort. This allows you to continuously improve efficiency over time and be sure that you are using the most up-to-date technologies to reduce operating costs. It can also be helpful to replace or add new components to your workload with new services.
9. Schedule on/off times. Scheduling activation/deactivation times for non-production instances, such as those used for development, staging, testing, and QA, saves approximately 65% of running these instances. You can also save a lot more, especially if your development teams work according to irregular patterns or schedules. You can apply more aggressive schedules by analyzing usage metrics to determine when instances are used most frequently, or apply an always-abort schedule that can be stopped when access to instances is required.
10. Upgrade your instances to the latest generation. When Amazon Web Services releases a new generation of instances, the latest instances tend to have improved performance and functionality over their predecessors. AWS gives you the ability to upgrade your existing instances to the latest generation or scale your existing instances with borderline usage metrics to benefit from the same level of performance at a lower cost.
In all these cases, the Cloud Partner can make a difference, not only in choosing the right services based on the needs of the end customer, but also as a guide in the journey to cloud, supporting and guiding the customer towards a correct and distributed management of Cloud resources by ensuring:
- Sustainability (Financial & Infrastructure)
- High Safety Standards
- Supporting and coordinating the operational growth of the business
- Support for research and development for the design of new products/services
AWS is not about paying for what you use, it’s about paying for what you forgot to turn off.
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