AWS cloud users are usually familiar with approaches to AWS cost optimization. The recent past has seen organizations overspending on the cloud, creating significant wastage and unused services. Currently, businesses are providing resources with a capacity greater than needed.
While rightsizing, purchasing and scheduling reserved instances are common approaches for predictable workloads, there are several others that organizations must follow to save more on their AWS cloud costs. With AWS cloud cost optimization, organizations can realize nearly 70% cost reduction by inspecting possible errors that add to the cloud costs.
Here are some key approaches that organizations must adhere to for improving their AWS cloud cost optimization.
Transitioning to Low-Cost Tiers
AWS offers six different tiers of storage with respective price points. For organizations to determine the most suitable storage tier depends on the frequency of accessing data and the pace at which the organization retrieves data during a disaster. Organizations can move their less-accessed data to storage tiers of relatively lower cost and see significant savings on their cloud costs.
Remove Unused Assets
Even unused assets of infrastructure contribute to the cost of AWS cloud operations. Such assets include obsolete snapshots, unused elastic load balancers, unattached EBS volumes, and components of instances activated during failed launches. A challenge that businesses usually face while implementing AWS cloud cost optimization tools is identifying and locating the unused assets. For instance, unattached IP addresses are increasingly difficult to find in the AWS Console or AWS System Manager. AWS recommends CloudHealth that offers businesses with complete visibility into their cloud environments.
Upgrade to Latest Generation Instances
The wide range of products and services that AWS offers, upgrades are frequently announced. These upgrades involve additional features integrated to support particular services. With AWS cloud cost optimization, the upgrades that organizations must keep an eye on are the ones associated with the latest generation instances. When new generations of instances are released, they result in improved functionality and performance. Organizations can either upgrade to the latest generation instances or downsize existing ones to keep their performance-optimized.
Rightsizing EC2 Instances
The main objective behind rightsizing EC2 instances is to match their sizes to workloads. However, the capacity of instances is doubled on every increase in their size, which makes the process difficult. Rightsizing is therefore seen as an approach that is worthwhile in case of instances whose peak utilization remains lower. On the other hand, it is worth analyzing the usage metrics to seek opportunities for moving workloads to other instances that better match their needs.
Buying Reserved Instances
The easy approach to AWS cloud cost optimization is buying reserved instances. However, if the reserved instances are not leveraged properly, they will add to the cloud costs. For this reason, it is recommended that effectively managing reserved instances is one of the best practices for AWS cost optimization. Effective management involves weighing up every variable before buying reserved instances, succeeded by monitoring usage metrics throughout the lifecycle of reservation.
To Sum UP
AWS cost optimization tools provide visibility into the cloud usage patterns while improving cost predictability and forecasting. This helps organizations to right-size services, reserve capacity for greater discounts and identify mismanaged resources. AWS cost optimization tools enable organizations to maximize value from investments and create a culture of ownership.
