Are You spending more on your AWS Cloud than you Should?

Optimizing costs in AWS cloud management

The entire premise of cloud computing is based on cost savings; opex over capex, cost of installing and upgrading hardware, software, security, and resources and training. But a number of businesses are finding their cloud costs overshooting budgets despite following recommended AWS best practices, viz: rightsizing, scheduling, and buying Reserved Instances. Though these remain excellent means of cloud cost-optimization, they can be supplemented by others that often go overlooked but can help you cut down your costs substantially.

Try these approaches to further optimize your cloud costs.

Pick the latest instances

AWS routinely releases new-generation instances that offer improved performance and greater functionality than their earlier model. Shifting to these, or alternatively downsizing instances with low utilization metrics, can help you benefit from cost savings while enjoying the same, or higher, performance levels.

Match storage tiers to your needs

Organizations should also take advantage of the choice of storage tiers that AWS offers at differing price points. Shifting less-accessed data to lower-priced storage enables a significant reduction in cloud cost.

Eliminate zombies

Like the undead in the movies, your cloud infrastructure could be rife with assets that are dead but not gone, but they can continue to make their presence felt by their unnecessary contribution to the cost of your AWS cloud. Obsolete snapshots, unattached EBS volumes, elastic load balancers, and components of instances dating back to failed launches, are all examples of wasteful assets that can be safely done away with.

If you’re finding it difficult to locate these unused assets, try AWS CloudHealth. Its express purpose is to help businesses gain visibility into their cloud environments. Using CouldHealth can help you find hard to locate assets, such as unattached IP addresses, which are not easy to find using the AWS System Manager or Console.

Match EC2 Instances to workloads

Remember, every time you increase the size of an EC2 instance, you double its capacity. Which is good if their peak utilization remains correspondingly high. However, you can only know this through active monitoring and managing of usage data. Routinely shifting workloads with lower utilization (this usually means instances with a peak utilization of less than 45%) to right-sized instances can keep control of your cloud costs without compromising cloud efficiency.

Buy Reserved Instances, but judiciously

Possibly the easiest route to optimizing cloud costs is to go for reserved instances. However, these could end up costing you more if they are not properly leveraged. This simply means that you need to manage reserved instances, i.e. scrutinize every variable before buying and follow it up with monitoring of usage across the lifecycle of the instance’s reservation. One way to cut costs is accurate scheduling of on/off times, for instances that are not strictly related to production, i.e. instances involved in testing, development, staging, etc. Do bear in mind though, that even when instances are scheduled to be off the meter is still ticking for EBS volumes as well as other attached components.

In Conclusion

Monitoring and measuring your cloud ecosystem remain the best approach to AWS cost optimization, but this can be enhanced by using tools that provide visibility into usage patterns, and tools that can predict the cost. Taking this approach will help businesses right-size services, use reserve capacity economically while identifying and managing resources more effectively.

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