I often hear from customers that the cost of running workloads on AWS has been much higher than expected. Many have shared that they've significantly exceeded their budgets, and the difficulty of operating in the cloud has become a real challenge. These customers have expressed that their costs have doubled since migrating from on-premises environments to AWS.
As a TAM one of my key goal is to help customers optimize their cost on AWS. Some of the biggest challenges with cost optimization is -
many customers don't have in-house expertise or dedicated teams focused on cloud cost optimization
As customers deploy more services, resources, and applications in the cloud, the overall environment becomes increasingly complex. Tracking, analyzing, and optimizing costs across this complex landscape can be a significant challenge.
Customers often struggle to accurately predict future usage and cost trends, making it difficult to plan and budget effectively.
Sharing Some of the Proven Cost Optimization recommendations I always share with my customers which have worked time and again:
Leveraging AWS Cost Management Tools is Absolutely Crucial for Effective Cost Optimization in the Cloud.
The AWS Cost Management tools, such as Cost Explorer, Budgets, and Cost and Usage Reports, provide comprehensive visibility into your cloud spending. They give you granular insights into your resource usage, costs, and spending trends, allowing you to identify areas for optimization. These tools also include cost anomaly detection capabilities to quickly flag unexpected spikes in spending. You can learn more about the AWS Cost Management tools in this deep dive article.
Proactive Cost Management via Budget Alerts and Notification
With features like cost alerts, budgets, and anomaly detection, these tools enable you to proactively manage your cloud costs. You can set custom budgets, receive notifications when you're approaching your limits, and quickly identify and address unexpected spikes in spending.
Eliminate Unused Resources
I have seen instances where customers are not even aware of the costs they are incurring on unused and dormant resources. Regularly audit your environment and identify unused or underutilized resources, such as EBS volumes, Elastic IPs, and Lambda functions, and remove them to avoid unnecessary charges.
It's Critical to Optimize Storage Cost
Since there is no commitment plan available at AWS for Storage, the cost of your EBS volumes, S3 buckets, and CloudWatch Logs can increase exponentially. To reduce storage costs:
- Analyze your storage usage and move infrequently accessed data to lower-cost storage tiers like Amazon S3 Glacier or Glacier Deep Archive. Set up lifecycle policies in Amazon S3 to automatically transition data between storage classes based on your defined rules.
Consider using storage-optimized instance types for your database workloads.
It is a common saying for EC2 - when you stop the instances, you stop paying. Yes, this is correct, but only for the compute and data transfer costs. If you have an EBS volume attached to the EC2 instance, you will continue to pay for storage. Identify unattached EBS volumes and delete the volumes that are not needed.
Migrate all your EBS volumes to GP3 to get an additional 20% discount on cost.
Develop scripts or use AWS services like AWS Lambda and AWS Data Lifecycle Manager to automate recurring storage optimization tasks, such as lifecycle policy management and snapshot archival.
Leverage Reserved Instances and Savings Plans
Take advantage of Amazon's pricing models like Reserved Instances and Savings Plans to lock in discounted rates for your long-term workloads. This can provide substantial savings compared to on-demand pricing.
Modernize Your Instances to the Latest Generation
Newer instance types typically offer more cost-effective pricing compared to older generations. Amazon regularly introduces new, more powerful instance families with improved price-performance ratios, allowing you to get more value for your money.
Right-Sizing Resources
Continuously monitor resource utilization and right-size instances, databases, and other services to match your actual workload requirements. This can lead to significant savings by eliminating over-provisioned resources.
You may be thinking this seems like a lot of work and would require significant effort to collect all this data. But you don't have to do it all manually - you can proactively get cost optimization recommendations based on your running workload using the AWS Trusted Advisor tool.
AWS Trusted Advisor is an invaluable tool for cost optimization and overall infrastructure health management. Trusted Advisor continuously evaluates your AWS environment using best practice checks across categories like cost optimization, performance, resilience, security, and operational excellence. It then provides actionable recommendations to help you remediate any deviations from best practices and optimize your cloud costs. You can learn more about Trusted Advisor here.
If you are running your workloads on AWS and need any support, leave a comment below. I would be more than happy to assist you in optimizing your AWS costs
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