The age of cloud computing has revolutionized the way enterprises operate their businesses. While cloud computing decreases time-to-market, improves agility by allowing businesses to adapt quickly to changing market demands, and, ultimately, drive down costs, over-provisioning and unused resources can often surge your cloud cost bills as you scale up your services. However, you can attain optimal cloud cost saving with an organised and structured mantra of ELIMINATE, OPTIMIZE, AUTOMATE, RESERVE, and REPEAT!
Here is an elaboration on this step by step saving guide:
- ELIMINATE — Remove unused resources:
7 out of 8 companies on AWS have 27% of cost build up due to unused resources. With a vast range of resources being launched on your AWS architecture, your first step towards saving should be to eliminate unused and underutilized resources via rightsizing. Botmetric enables its users to effectively eliminate unused resources such as stale snapshots and unused volumes with a single ‘click-to-fix’ functionality. - OPTIMIZE — Rightsize your underutilized resources:
Cloud architects spend 25% of their time in analyzing how to rightsize the cloud to reduce cloud cost. While most of the time rightsizing is misunderstood as a cost-cutting, it actually means choosing the cheapest instance while meeting performance requirements without compromising on capacity or other technical requirements. In order to effectively rightsize, it is important to understand the usage by paying attention to already running resources and performing analytics. Rightsizing can help you save money without compromising on capacity or performance. - AUTOMATE — Start/Stop Dev Instances
4 out of 6 AWS users incur unnecessary costs by running dev instances over weekends. Since every running instance is billed, it is recommended to stop the Dev instances when not in use and then restart the instances only when required. Cloud automation tools like Botmetric support automaton jobs feature to shutdown and start EC2 servers based on instance tags on Friday night and bring them online on Monday early morning. It only requires few hours or days of effort but it can help you save anywhere 15% to 20% of the EC2 costs for DEV/QA instances. - RESERVE — Identify Unused RIs Within Running Instances and Modify Them
AWS Reserved Instances(RI) can significantly lower your computing costs by up to 75%, however purchasing RI happens during business budgeting cycles in the enterprises and it also depends on the workload/new applications adoption along with current consumption changes.
With respect to RI planning in enterprises the difficulty lies in effectively monitoring and managing the variation of workload patterns, changes in deployment architectures and new apps adoption of the existing RI purchases for maximising ROI. Visualizing all the running instance and knowing which reservation should be modified is considered to be one of the best practises for cloud cost optimization. - REPEAT — Manage and Keep Track of Reservations
89% of AWS users express that reservation management is one of the key areas they need assistance with. The most critical part about reserving instances is their the management of these instances. Many times the usage of the purchased RI diminishes much before its expiration. So, always list the portfolio of existing reservations and monitor the portfolio for non-usage, near expiry or expired state, etc. If you are exhausting your usage on a particular reserved instance class before the tenure, then plan for next immediate usage. Modifying these reservations such that it suits current available utility must be the way forward. Proper tracking and re-utilization can set you back on track and help save cloud cost. Cloud management platforms like Botmetric offer a clean RI portfolio that helps you visualize, manage, and govern your reservations, easily.
In a nutshell, you need to have a good review process and timely alerts along with smart tools for effective cloud cost management. The cost turbulence can be easily evaded by businesses through streamlined processes that aid in managing the business budget & spend forecast. ELIMINATE. OPTIMIZE. AUTOMATE. RESERVE. REPEAT must be the mantra for effective cloud cost management.
Download the full guide on ‘AWS cost savings 101’ here: http://know.botmetric.com/aws-cloud-cost-saving-101-whitepaper
