10 Practical Ways To Optimize Your AWS Costs

  • 15 May 2021
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Cloud

Amazon Web Services, the popular cloud computing service, offers a range of flexible pricing options along with a multitude of quality services. These aspects help users greatly to manage costs while still keeping up with its best performance and capacity as per the needs of your business. This article largely focuses on the several ways that can help you minimize your AWS costs effectively!

Right sizing

Right sizing pertains to using the lowest cost resource that meets the technical requirements of a certain workload. You must ensure that the monitor accurately reflects the end-user experience and assesses modification costs while selecting the right granularity for the analysis period that is needed to cover any cycle of the system. Some examples of modified AWS services are Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), RDS and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Review networking and delete unnecessary load balancers

The Trusted Advisor Idle Load Balancer check helps you acquire a report of those load balancers that possess RequestCount of below 100 over the last 1 week. You can opt for deleting these load balancers in order to reduce costs. You can also review the cost of your data transfer by using the Cost Explorer and if you find out that transfer of data from EC2 to the internet is showing increased costs then you can use the Amazon Cloud Front. This eliminates chances of over provision capacity for serving potential spikes in traffic.

On Demand instances

On demand instances allow you to increase or reduce the capacity of resources that one needs on the basis of demand of application. This is suggested for those applications that include short term workloads and those that are used for testing and development environments.

Schedule it or turn it off

In order to obtain a cost optimized workload, this is the most critical aspect. You can opt for shutting down the unused instances while you are working in development environments. You can choose and schedule on and off times while working on cases that are non-productive such as developing, testing, etc. This will enable you save up to about 70 percent off the costs on AWS cloud.

Attribute provisioning

You need to have a proper understanding of the requirements of adjusting the capacity of service for provisioning systems on various Cloud services. In AWS, you can change the attributes of services managed by AWS with the help of AWS Management Console or SDKs or AWS APIs for aligning resources as per the changing demand.

Deleting obsolete snapshots

Snapshots help you with data backup on an EBS volume to an S3 storage bucket as the only data backup that has changed since the last snapshot for preventing duplications in the S3 bucket. Generally, you will need only the recent snapshot for restoring data in case something goes wrong. Although snapshots do not cost much individually, you can save up to a significant amount of money if you delete those that are old and not needed anymore.

Upgrade AWS instances to the latest generation

AWS keeps on introducing new generation instances with greater functionality and improved performance in comparison to their previous versions. If you opt for upgrading instances to the latest generations or downsizing existing instances as per requirement then you can reap the benefits of same performance level but at lower costs.

Release Elastic IP addresses that are unattached

Elastic IP addresses allow AWS instances to be reached with the help of internet. Businesses are eligible to have a maximum of five such Elastic IP addresses per account as Amazon cannot have an infinite pool of IP addresses. These are free of charges when they are attached to a running service. However, if you tend to remap a particular IP address more than 100 times in a month or you hang on to any unattached Elastic IP address even after terminating the instance to which it was attached, then the free of charge rule changes.  You will have to pay a certain amount for such instances; therefore, it is suggested to release any unattached Elastic IP address.

Unattached EBS volumes should be deleted

Whenever you launch an EC2 instance, there exists an EBS volume attached to it that serves as its local block storage. Whenever the EC2 instance is terminated, the attached EBS volume gets deleted only if the box mentioning “delete on termination” was checked at the time of the launch of the instance. In case the box was not checked, the related EBS volume remains to exist while adding up to the monthly AWS cost. Therefore, always opt for deleting such unattached EBS volumes if unused.

Spot Instances

Spot instances allow users to make use of the spare compute capacity while reducing the AWS costs. Do consider the instance type while using Spot instances, the resource and location and design for continuity. These are best suited for use cases such as scientific research, batch processing, video or image processing, testing and financial analysis. Spot instances also help to reduce cost of running applications by increasing the scale for computing.

 

 

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