Ten Ways to Reduce Your AWS Bill

Ten Ways to Reduce Your AWS Bill

April 10, 2020 / Nirav Shah

This blog will detail how you can reduce the AWS bill of your AWS cloud infrastructure. We will provide some guidelines based on the experience of our organization for handling AWS costs and share some tips that worked well for us.

Let us first start with the process of analyzing your AWS bill. So we recommended

you to first check below things:

1. Use the Cost Explorer to segregate costs by service type.
   • Which services cause the highest costs?
   • Do the costs per service match with your assumptions? For example, it is quite unlikely that you want to spend 2x more on CloudWatch than on EC2.
2. Open your AWS bill for the last three months and drill down into the details.
   • Which resources of a service cause high costs? Justify the costs.
   • Do the costs per service match with your estimations?
   • Are there any hints for expenses caused by unused resources?

Some other ways to optimize your AWS costs:

1) EC2 — Elastic Compute Cloud

The first thing you need to do when reducing EC2 spending is to shut down unused instances. To reduce costs even further, use Spot Instances to scale-up your resources.The next cost-saving step is to have long-term (12 or 36 months) reservations for the instances you run 24/7.

Purchase Savings Plans: More information at https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/

Using AMD or ARM based instance types in favor of Intel-based instance types and it is also worth a look.

• Savings potential for AMD-based instance types (e.g., t3a, m5a, and r5a): 10%
• Savings potential for ARM-based instance types: 40%

To know what is AMD and ARM please refer to below link

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/

2) S3 — Simple storage Service

• Use S3 Intelligent Tiering
• If you need to archive your data check the Glacier Deep Archive.

More details at:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-s3-storage-class-glacier-deep-archive/

3) Data Transfer (ELB & S3)

AWS has three major data transfer costs that are Transfer Out, Inter-Regions and Inter AZ. Some ideas below to reduce costs:

• Transfer-Out: Move to CloudFront
• Inter AZ: Centralize noncritical applications under a single AZ
• Inter-Region: Centralize noncritical applications under a single Region

Replacing your REST APIs for GraphQL APIs will also bring you savings. The reason for that is because GraphQL will reduce the number of requests performed. To know more about GraphQL follow this link: https://aws.amazon.com/graphql

4) Monitor, Track and Analyze your Services Usage

Trusted Advisor and CloudWatch are monitoring and management tools to access your instance metrics. Based on the data collected, you can assess your workloads and scale your instance size up or down. Each CloudWatch alarm costs $0.10 per month and CloudWatch dashboard costs $3.00 per month. Therefore, delete needless alarms and dashboards.Daily monitoring will help you to identify suspicious uptrends and take action as soon as possible.

To know about the Trusted Advisor visit our previous blog:

https://www.eternalsoftsolutions.com/blog/aws-cost-optimization-tools/

5) Select the correct AWS Region to minimize costs

Cost varies by region if you Choose the wrong one, and you will end up paying a lot more.

• Cheapest regions are: North Virginia, Ohio and Oregon
• Most expensive regions: São Paulo, Sidney, and Hong Kong

6) VPC — Virtual Private Cloud

Traffic between Availability Zones is charged at $0.02/GB. Check the traffic costs and think about making changes to your architecture when necessary.

7) Auto Scaling

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling helps you maintain application availability and allows you to automatically add or remove EC2 instances according to conditions that you have define.so as per your requirement you can configure it

To know more about in details please visit below link

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ec2/userguide/as-scaling-simple-step.html

8) Unused infrastructur

Detached Elastic IPs (EIPs), beacues they are free when attached to an EC2 instance but if you don’t use it you have to pay for it.

Load Balancer (ELB) :- Remove the unused load balancer because the cost around is $0.025 per load balancer per hour (or partial hour), and $0.008 per GB of data processed by the load balancer.

Note: Trusted advisor Tool can be used to remove above unused services

9) Elasticache — Reserved Nodes

Very few people know that you can purchase reserved instances for Elasticache. The savings are pretty good and detailed below:

1 Year Reservation — 65% discount

3 Years Reservation — 77% discount

The process is similar to acquiring EC2 reserved instances. To obtain a reserved node please go through below link

https://www.cloudconformity.com/knowledge-base/aws/ElastiCache/unused-reserved-cache-nodes.html

10) Choose AWS Support Type

There are four types of support levels

Basic — Free

Developer — $29/mo or 3% of monthly bill

Business — $100/mo or 10%-3% of the monthly bill depending on the volume

Enterprise →$15,000

For more information please visit

https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/support/compare-plans/

Resources

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/startups/six-ways-to-reduce-your-aws-bill/

https://blog.back4app.com/2019/06/24/optimize-aws-costs/

https://medium.com/@george_51059/reduce-aws-costs-74ef79f4f348

https://read.acloud.guru/there-are-four-reasons-to-explain-how-using-aws-can-chane-the-economic-model-of-the-it-services-850dcc8ea1aa

https://cloudonaut.io/aws-cost-optimization-101/

https://github.com/alexcasalboni/aws-lambda-power-tuning

https://medium.com/teads-engineering/real-life-aws-cost-optimization-strategy-at-teads-135268b0860f