(+44) 0151 332 3839
(+1) 737-304-6185
If you're like most businesses, you're looking for ways to reduce your AWS bill. And rightly so - the cost of using AWS can add up quickly. But simply relying on AWS...
Leveraging AWS presents an excellent opportunity to cut down on infrastructure costs, but maintaining budgetary control is crucial. In this blog post, we will provide valuable tips to assist you in minimising your AWS costs and enhancing their predictability.
We'll also discuss ways to optimise your AWS environment for performance and cost savings. Let's get started!
What are the costs in AWS?
Firstly let's just recap what the main AWS costs are, and then we can look at how we can manage them.
- Compute - Virtual machines often known as EC2 on AWS
- Network - Moving data into AWS is free of charge across all regions. But moving data around and out of AWS is charged
- Storage - This can be a variety of services from volumes for VMs to data lakes etc... all of this is charged at different rates
- Services - By this we mean SaaS or PaaS bundled services like Amazon Aurora (A bundled database service). Services are often consumption based on transactions or another metric which can make the tricky to budget for
That's a simple overview of the main areas you will need to consider when trying to reduce AWS costs.
How to reduce AWS costs:
1. Know your usage patterns and forecast for the upcoming month, quarter and year...
The first step in any problem is understanding the problem. AWS infrastructure has a tendency to grow over time and sometimes become a bit unmanageable. There are out-of-the-box tools which allow you to get an understanding of your spend and set up alerts for thresholds.
Get an understanding of where your AWS costs are going and then you can look at a couple of things to bring the monthly AWS cost down:
- Identify any unused cloud resources - Delete these or shut them down for a period and then delete them
- Review your usage patterns and then implement auto-scaling - Scale back your AWS cloud infrastructure out of hours or at the weekend
2. Compare pricing options and decide what's best for your needs
For your core services are there any other options? You need to ask this question regularly to stay on top of changes in AWS services.
The dynamic nature of the AWS cloud platform requires staying abreast of changes and maintaining a balance between performance and cost. Utilising the AWS calculator is a valuable method for estimating the impact of service changes on your monthly AWS costs.
Nevertheless, extracting meaningful estimates from the calculator can be challenging due to its comprehensive coverage across numerous services and global regions. To aid in obtaining accurate estimates, we've compiled some tips and tricks to navigate the complexities of the calculator effectively, here.
3. Use reserved instances to get discounts on compute power
Reserved instances give you the ability to get discounts on compute power and reduce AWS costs, and they can be a great way to save money on your AWS bill. There are two main types of reserved instances:
- Standard reserved instances - Offer the lowest price, but they're also the least flexible.
- Convertible reserved instances - Are more expensive, but they offer more flexibility.
Selecting the appropriate reserved instance can be a complex decision based on your specific requirements. If navigating this decision feels challenging, and you're uncertain about its impact on your costs, reach out to us. With CloudOps, we can assist in effectively managing your costs, maintenance, and performance in AWS.
Automate resource provisioning, maintenance and cost reviews to save time and money
One of the biggest wins for any AWS cost review is to implement auto-scaling and tune your AWS workload to be there when needed. This is not the easiest thing to do but the cost savings can be significant, especially if you have remote teams or standard working hours.
Why pay for something that's meant to be a flexible resource when you are not using it? Yet, many businesses move to the cloud and just implement the same approach to have everything sitting there all the time when it could be turned down / off a third to a half of the time and have no detrimental effects on the business.
This has been a quick overview of some key areas to consider when trying to control and reduce AWS costs, for a more in-depth article please have a look here.
