Did you know that AWS has reduced prices 67 times since launching in 2006? But, costs increase when consumption increases.
AWS cost optimization keywords and strategies to keep in mind are cost allocation, cost visibility, zombie (or wasted) assets, reserved resources, instance scheduling, right sizing, data tiering, and point instances.
How to deal with this reality?
Here are some AWS cost optimization and cost management best practices, DevOps strategies, and sources of increased consumption you can act on:
- Resource provisioning and decommissioning. Don't let unused resources pile up (inflated app count, unused servers, unused storage). Instead, actively disable features.
- Don't wait for performance issues to be fixed. Don't expect poor application performance to add features and increase instance sizes. Also, understand if you are adding too much and getting strong performance versus adding just enough features as the result will look the same and you may be overspending.
- Always look for new ranking optimization ideas. Assign values for the impact/effort ratio of optimization ideas, implement and methodically progress through the list.
- Consider what you can remove to cut costs. Optimizing for high usage involves discovering and removing unused applications, unused instances, unused storage volumes, Elastic volumes
Block Storage (EBS), unused snapshots, and unattached Elastic IP addresses. - Rearrange to not over-provision. Resize instances and storage volumes, as well as reduce the performance of storage volumes. When you can't remove, make sure you constantly resize. The Amazon CloudWatch can help on all of that.
- Refactor quarterly or annually. It's tedious, but look at each application and make sure the architecture is as efficient as possible. Your AWS account team can also perform a well-architected AWS review.
- Update instances to the latest generation. AWS makes regular announcements about how products have been updated and when new features are introduced in support services. Pay attention to those that concern the last generation instances.
They are likely to have improved performance and functionality which helps to upgrade existing instances to the latest generation or downsize existing instances to benefit from the same level of performance at a cheaper cost.
Visibility is key to optimizing AWS cloud costs
At the end of the day, visibility is key to optimizing cloud costs.
So make sure your team sets trends, budgets, and forecasts for different teams and departments. This setup will help you identify where changes occur and why things might look wrong for better AWS cloud cost management.
Every member of your organization who works with AWS and has a role in using the cloud should know the costs he and his team incur.
Having your teams do this exercise also raises their awareness of the spend they are generating and how they can reduce cloud costs.
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