EC2 capacity planning and EC2 reservations on AWS from a cost management perspective is still a challenge for the IT/Finance teams. The process of planning, reserving, right-sizing AWS instances with apt configurations at the right time with the right platform definitely takes up a lot of time and effort.
This article will help enterprises plan AWS RIs like a pro strategically and optimize their cloud cost by up to five times in the shortest time possible.
So what are the 7 stepping stones to effective AWS RI Planning? Botmetric brings you ways in which you can bulletproof your RI Planning and gain optimal cost savings:
1) Run Botmetric on your AWS cloud
Perform a complete check of your AWS cloud using Botmetric, and review all the insights you get from the dashboards. By doing so, you precondition and bulletproof your AWS cloud for optimization and effective RI Planning. If you still have not used Botmetric, sign-up for a trial here.
2) Use the Cost Optimizer
To make your AWS RI Planning a well-oiled and well-orchestrated process, you need to identify unused resources first. Upon identification of these unused resources, perform the following actions using Botmetric and optimize your AWS cloud:
- Remove unused Elastic IPs and ELBs
- Delete old, unattached EBS volumes
- Delete old and or excessive snapshots for EC2 and RDS
- De-register old AMIs
Botmetric uses AWS best practices and performs more than 80 audits and helps you perform the above tasks with just a few clicks.
3) Use the Unused RI recommendations
Your AWS RI Planning can be more productive only when on-demand servers are allocated to already paid but unused RIs. With Botmetric, you can use its unused RI recommendations and perform the allocation of on-demand servers in the shortest time possible. This action ultimately leads to savings with no infra changes.
Additionally, modify current RI definition(s) to move from on-demand to already paid RI plan. This can be performed by switching AZ, moving from classic to VPC, and/or by changing instance types within the same instance families.
4) Use Cost Insights to review underutilized resources
Make your AWS RI Planning more effectual with Botmetric’s Cost Insights that can identify all AWS resources with low utilization. Review all the EC2, EBS/RDS PIOPS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache Cluster, EBS Volumes, and ELBs identified by Botmetric. Post review, analyze and plan for downgrades of all the underutilized resources.
5) Use Botmetric’s Instance Family Recommendation
The success of your AWS RI planning also depends on the type of instance families used. Use Botmetric’s instance family recommendation feature to plan for new target instance types — for improved price performance. We, at Botmetric, also recommend our users to migrate t1/m1 to t2, m1 to m3, c1 to c3, m2/cr1 to r3,hi1 to i2, and hs1 to d2 to make your RI planning top-notch.
6) Avoid paying for Dev-Test environments
We, at Botmetric, recommend not to pay for Dev-Test environments/resources that are not in use. Why? To save more than 60 percent of the cost. How? By automating the Start-Stop process of the resources in this environment easily using our Botmetric.
7) Plan for Reserve Instances for all resources
Upon completion of resource optimization and initial analysis, you can start planning for RIs for underutilized resources and previous generation instances. Finally, perform RI planning for all other resources and save significant costs.
To know more about the benefits of AWS Reserved Instances, do read our blog Top Insights On AWS Reserved Instances.
Go ahead! Start reserving and saving on cloud.
This exclusive post is written by Minjar Cloud’s Chief Delivery Officer, Anindo Sengupta. To read one of his Linkedin Pulse posts on automating governance on AWS using tags, click here.
