The Best Ways to Lower your Monthly Costs on AWS
Are you struggling to find the IT budget for new business initiatives? It’s easy for companies to tie up excess spend in current tooling without realizing it. According to Gartner, without cloud cost optimization, businesses could be overspending by more than 70% in the cloud.
But what’s the best ways to reduce costs on AWS? According to our cloud cost optimization experts, there are six things you can do to help improve your infrastructure while freeing up spend for other business initiatives.
Use a Cost Dashboard to track and understand costs
With cost allocation tags you can create a cost dashboard to get a granular look at costs by region, service, and other important factors. This will not only give you the ability to track spending but also identify the baseline cost.
Monitor Cost Trends
Certain cost trends are indicators of cloud architecture patterns that can lead to cost concerns. Knowing what these look like upfront can prevent long-term cost consequences.
Look at Cost vs. Utilization
Without automation, it can be easy to commit errors like horizontal and vertical scaling, which ultimately result in using the wrong resources or not having the right resources for the right price. By tracking your utilization and turning off old instances, you can find simple ways to save on wasted resources.
Examine Cost Ratios
Cost ratios are dependent on your environment, but can be a valuable way to gain insight into the health and efficiency of your infrastructure. Ratios show where optimization may be valuable and where a change in strategy might be necessary.
Utilize a Tagging Strategy
Tagging allows you to separate and differentiate costs by a product or service, allowing you to see the differences in usage. Managing tags can keep accounts in order and identify services that may need optimizing.
Have a Reserved Instances Strategy
Reserved instances can be valuable financial instruments to maintaining a low AWS spend. Having a reserved instance strategy allows you to cut costs by planning for your architectural needs upfront.
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More of the Best Ways to Reduce Costs on AWS
Finding the IT budget to drive new business initiatives can be a challenge. Similarly, knowing the appropriate IT spend for your business and how to optimize it is an issue all its own. This eBook is here to help with some of those pain points. With our six steps to optimizing the AWS Cloud, you’ll learn how to improve your infrastructure and also free up budgets to drive innovation and move your business forward.
Following our six steps provides immediate impact by offering valuable insight into your current costs and give you areas to optimize. Some additional resources you can use in conjunction with this eBook to help you find success are our on demand cost optimization video and a free trial of our cost optimization tool, Cloud Optimizer™.
We have a customer that had a huge number of unattached EBS
volumes. When I say huge, we’re talking $20,000 to $30,000 per
month-volumes that nobody is using. That’s where Cloud Optimizer™
comes in, it helps you identify idle and unused resources.
– Timothy Fox, VP of Managed Services
Understand Your Cost
While it should be as simple as glancing at your bill, understanding your AWS cost
is not always easy. A typical AWS detailed billing record (DBR) will have
two to eight unique line items for every dollar of cost. If you utilize cost
allocation tags, the data becomes even more granular. With 97 AWS services,
20 regions, and thousands of unique usage types, AWS cost management can
get convoluted quickly.
Due to this complexity, cost management on AWS should be treated as a data
problem. The primary challenge is to identify actionable cost trend information
(for example costs for specific services or types of usage) within the larger
overall cost trend. The first step toward managing AWS costs is to tackle the
data problem with a data solution — let’s start with dashboards.
A good cost dashboard will give you the ability to track spend down to
meaningful sub components, which should help you establish baseline cost,
as well as understand variation and trends.
Some of the items your dashboard should track include:
• Cost by Service
• Cost by Region
• Cost by Unique AWS Account
• Cost by Allocation
• Day-to-day cost trends
• Month-to-month cost trends
By breaking out cost tracking in this manner, you’re able to understand which
services and assets in play have the greatest impact, identify items that are no
longer in use, and track trends to establish cost expectations for your
environment.
To get the rest of the guide to AWS Cost Optimization, Download our eBook now!
