The AWS ‘pay as you go’ model brought a revolutionary realization of IT resources for many enterprises. However, as these resources were swift to launch, unlike earlier data center, governance of this virtual IT environment became difficult. This further added to the costs, thereby giving huge surprises in bills. But with just a few tweaks, the cost optimization burden can be eased. Tools like Botmetric come with a host of solutions for customers who are interested in significant cost optimization along with security & performance. Here, we’re listing down a few essential tweaks which will help cloud practitioners save upto 60% of their total cloud cost spending.
Best Practices for AWS Cloud Cost Optimization
1. Shut down or downgrade AWS resources that are not necessary or underutilized
To realize ‘pay-as-you-go’ pricing by AWS and to optimally run all the services, enterprises must stop those services that remain idle for a specified time or those services that are no longer in use. For instance, on weekends, EC2 and RDS instances have almost nil workload. In such scenarios, enterprises can shut them down on Friday evening and then start them again on Monday morning. By doing so, enterprises can save a lot of money.
2. Optimize resources by time of the day
One of the efficient ways to cost saving in AWS is to understand the organization’s workload requirements. For example, when do periodic spikes and drops in workloads occur during the day. With elasticity of AWS, enterprises can auto scale their resources according to workloads and save a lot of money on over/underutilized resources even with the usual launch of instances. Essentially, the elasticity of cloud infrastructure plays a critical role in effectively saving on cloud spend.
3. Timely cleanup of resources
As an enterprise scales its infrastructure, a lot of unused resources such as old snapshots, unused EIPs, security groups, DynamodB and more, get build up. Even though unused, these resources are billed. With timely and regular detection, cleanup and fixing of such resources will provide a clearer topology of the AWS infrastructure, eventually saving money on the AWS monthly bill.
4. Choosing the best instance type
AWS provides a vast list of EC2 instances. An enterprise can choose the configurations as per their business workloads. Prior to buying EC2 instances, it is recommended to perform an assessment of appropriate EC2 type for the workload and choose a new type of EC2 instances over classic instances, for increased capabilities. The best way forward is to start with architecture and memory, and then proceed to virtual cores.
5. Utilize Reserved Instances (RIs) smartly
Reserving instances on AWS is one of the most efficient and smartest cost saving techniques in AWS. However, it is a long time commitment. The art relies on evenly breaking the cost of RI acquired. And, enterprises need to keep a constant check on reserved capacity personally and reserve EC2 instances that are expected to run for more than 225 days non-stop to breakeven. In addition, AWS EC2 Instances using less than 10 percent of daily average CPU on at least four of the previous 14 days can be marked as low CPU utilization instances. Such instances do not require higher configurations and it is recommended to change the type of these instances to have a lesser configuration. This will further ensure in reducing the overall cost of AWS cloud infrastructure.
6. Enforce stringent tagging policies
In most cloud environments, multiple personas have the ability to modify/ launch resources as and when needed in the environment. If an enterprise does not follow appropriate tagging practices, it can jeopardize its cost saving plan.
These have proven to bring down cloud costs by more than 60% in most cases. If you are an advanced user and cost saving requirements are beyond these basics, or if you’re looking to make most of the above steps automated, you may try Botmetric Free for 14 days here. Good luck and save well.
This post was originally submitted by Riyaz Hyder, Head of Marketing-Minjar, Botmetric. To read the original article, click here.
