For close to a decade, Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud has earned a lot of accolades among the enterprises. In fact, many enterprises were born on the AWS cloud. And the factors that drove them to embrace AWS cloud were many, including lower IT costs, increased efficiency, better employee mobility, more time to innovate, and much more.
One of the factors that got precedence over all the other factors was its competitive pricing. IDC, in one of its reports, made it evident that the five-year total cost of ownership (TCO) of developing, deploying, and managing critical applications in AWS cloud represents a 72 percent savings when compared to deploying the same resources on-premises or in hosted environments.
Clearly, AWS stands tall as a leader in offering competitive prices in the cloud arena. Having known that, don’t just stop there. There are few AWS cost optimization techniques that you can work on, which will help save more. Not just more, much much more.
Here are the few tricks of the trade:
Build an effective tagging strategy for cost compliance
An effective tagging and monitoring practice is a cornerstone towards ensuring budgeting and cost compliance with respect to chargebacks. So, following a disciplined tagging strategy will go a long way in optimizing the cloud for cost. The tagging can be automated as part of your DevOps process.
Smartly provision unused reserved EC2s & downgrade underutilized EC2 instances
Keep a constant check on reserved capacity personally and reserve EC2 instances that are expected to run for more than 225 days non-stop. Additionally, AWS EC2 Instances that use less than 10 percent daily average CPU on at least four of the previous 14 days are marked as low CPU utilization EC2 instances. Even the network IOs that are less than 5MB are marked as low utilization. These instances do not require higher configurations. Change the type of these instances to have a lesser configuration. By doing so, will aid in drastically reducing the overall cost of AWS cloud infrastructure.
Detect unused elastic IPs and use them
Elastic IPs cost money when they are unused! Detect such EIPs that are either unused or attached to stopped instances, across regions at a very early stage, and put them to use for optimal savings on AWS.
Check for ECU Vs. vCPU Pricing
Keep a check on cost per ECU per hour and cost per vCPU per hour for a given period. It is a better metric than plain dollar values to judge your cost optimization efforts effectively.
Delete all the old Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots and volumes
All AWS EBS snapshots, including the old snapshots that are underused/unused, cost money. The best way forward is to list all old snapshots and remove them. In addition to EBS snapshots, you can delete unwanted EBS volumes too. For the reason that all volumes are billed too. So why pay for unused EBS volumes or those that are unattached or have less than one IOPS per day for the past seven days?
Shut down all the idle Relational Database Services (RDSs)
Idle Data Base (DB) instances — those that have not had a connection for a prolonged time, cost too. To cater to this, you can list all the idle DB instances and shut down those instances to reduce cloud spend. It is recommended that if RDS DB is idle for 7 or more days, you can take DB snapshot and delete it.
These pointers are some of the quintessential AWS cost optimization techniques you can inculcate in your day-to-day cloud optimization tasks. There are much more ways to attain cost optimization on the cloud. And if all these seem daunting, then you should give Botmetric a try. Botmetric performs all these tasks using CloudOps automation, DevOps automation and other audits underpinned by 80+ AWS best practices, eventually making your life easy. Botmetric features are not limited to these. There are much more!
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Article Courtesy: Amarkant Singh
