March 6, 2020 / Nirav Shah
AWS is a global phenomena for cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and it continues to consolidate new customers and vendors with its emphasis on security, innovation, and scale. With the increase in adoption of AWS services and cutting edge services an issue that has been bugging many system admin and business owner is cost. Though AWS’s pay-as-you-go model is awesome for startups, heavy planning and cost optimization is required for enterprises to keep the costing under the sanctioned budget. As an AWS certified partner, today we are going to explore the services that are going to help you optimize your AWS infrastructure and reduce underlying costs.
AWS provides three key services that help us to examine infrastructure and reduce the costs.
This tool provides all the resources you need for understanding and optimizing your AWS costs.
There are Two key features include.
1.1. AWS Cost Explorer
Through this tool you can review cost and usage over specific time period, filter and group your cost data. AWS Cost Explorer provides a number of essential, valuable reports, including monthly AWS service costs and EC2 monthly costs.
Pricing
This service is free. You can view your costs and usage using the Cost Explorer user interface free of charge.but You can also access your data programmatically using the Cost Explorer API. Each paginated API request incurs a charge of $0.01.
More information at ⏩AWS Cost Explorer
1.2. AWS Budgets
Set custom monthly, yearly, budgets for your AWS usage and get alerts when you exceed those budgets — or when AWS predicts you have the potential to.
The AWS Budgets dashboard gathers all your budget data into one place, so you can easily analyze and assess your data.
Pricing
AWS Budgets has a Free Tier offering of 60 free budget days per month (essentially two active budgets on every day of the month), and each subsequent budget will incur a cost of $0.02 per day.
More information at ⏩AWS Budgets
Based on AWS operational best practices, Trusted Advisor is an application that scans your AWS infrastructure and provides real-time results to help you optimize not only cost, but also performance, security, fault tolerance, and service limits.
For example, when helping optimize costs, Trusted Advisor applies best practices related to eliminating resource wastage, such as adjusting EC2 Reserved Instance usage, identifying idle load balancers, and reporting on underutilized EC2 instances. Trusted Advisor will, when needed, recommend investigation or courses of action you can take to reduce your AWS bills.
More information at ⏩AWS trusted Advisor
AWS Savings Plans is used for long term use for AWS services (e.g EC2,AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda usage). Savings Plans is a flexible pricing model that provides savings of up to 72% on your AWS compute usage. This pricing model offers lower prices on Amazon EC2 instances usage, regardless of instance family, size, OS, tenancy or AWS Region.
Two type of Savings Plans which Amazon provides are
1. Compute Savings Plans saving upto 66% rates on demand rates uses for lambda,ec2,fargate.
2. EC2 Instance Savings Plans saving upto 72% rates on demand rates ,and uses for only EC2.
In both plans we have to commit to a consistent amount of usage (measured in $/hour) for a 1 or 3 year term.
More information at ⏩Compute Savings plans
NOTE
Though AWS services are cheaper than conventional dedicated hosts, as a business best practice an advance planning will always help in optimum usage of resources like you have to properly calculate how many instances are required,what size,and from which family and operating system. Once this is done AWS will take care of scaling and redundancy.
Some links that might be useful to you are
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_zlPQimrvY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZqtAp9BCw8
Also Read: Reduce AWS Compute Cost with AWS Compute Optimizer
FAQs:
As a Director of Eternal Web Private Ltd an AWS consulting partner company, Nirav is responsible for its operations. AWS, cloud-computing and digital transformation are some of his favorite topics to talk about. His key focus is to help enterprises adopt technology, to solve their business problem with the right cloud solutions.
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