Business organizations are today seemingly spending excessive amounts of money on storage and computing services. This is especially true for those companies that are looking to expand their computing and storage capacities to deal with growing requirements. This is where Amazon Web Services AWS cost reduction strategies can work wonders to save on such expenses.
When businesses choose to migrate to cloud services providers, such as AWS, it allows businesses to increase efficiency to combat the growing workload and at the same time to reduce the overall cost of business operations. There are significant advantages of choosing ultra-modern pay-as-you-go hardware services as compared to those services which require you to pay a set amount up-front.
Basic Steps before Cost Reduction
Before you act on reducing costs, you need to determine the exact expense that the current AWS services are costing you. With the help of the AWS Free Tier service, you can explore and use the AWS services for a free trial period. This way, you can determine the specific AWS services which are useful to you and remove the ones that are costing you unnecessarily.
AWS Cost Reduction Strategies – Basic steps
The next step is to use the AWS Cost Explorer to monitor and analyze your overall AWS service usage and cost. This is an excellent tool to visualize cost and usage at resource levels (EC2 Instance ID, etc) or high level (AWS services, AWS accounts, etc). First, use the “Monthly costs by linked account report” feature to identify the top most-expensive accounts. Second, you will need to check the services which are contributing most towards expenses in these accounts using the “Monthly costs by service report”. You can tweak the hourly and resource level granularity and tags to fine-tune your search for the most expense-incurring services.
3 Best AWS Cost Reduction Strategies
Saving money is one of the oldest tricks in business to grow it. The same principle applies when using Amazon Web Services as well. It is important to have control over the cost of your AWS infrastructure and workload. Experts advise thinking above the basic pricing cuts when employing AWS services. There are numerous advantages when it comes to cost-cutting with AWS.
Let’s check out the best AWS cost reduction strategies:
1 – Remove Unwanted AWS Resources
It is important to shut down unused AWS services to cut down on operational costs. With the help of Elastic Beanstalk and AWS OpWorks developers can swiftly deploy and re-deploy applications without the hassle of the underlying infrastructure’s configuration.
AWS Cost Reduction Strategies – Remove unwanted AWS resources
When you use AWS CloudFormation to identify your infrastructure as code, it becomes easier for developers to create resource templates of your AWS resources. This allows developers to quickly build and rebuild your instances. This unique way of cloud computing ensures that the core concept of ephemeral workloads, which involves shutting down and deleting unused AWS apps, easier.
2 – Use the Right Storage Class
The Amazon S3 storage offers 5 tiers, and it is essential to know how and when to use the individual class to optimize costs. The cost for each tier is broken down into the actual storage amount, the number of HTTP PUT requests, the volume of data transferred and the number of HTTP GET requests.
Here’s a look at the different rates and requirements for the different Amazon S3 storage services:
- Amazon S3 Standard – This tier is meant for general purpose and mostly used for accessing data and for various other similar cases. This is part of the AWS Free Usage Tier and gives users 5 GB of storage on Amazon S3, 2,000 PUT requests, 20,000 GET requests, and 15 GB of monthly data transfer.
- Amazon S3 Standard – Infrequent Access (IA) – This tier is designed less-used data, and requires the same resilience as a standard storage class. However, the data from this tier can be accessed quickly when required. Although S3 – IA costs less than the standard S3, there is a charge of USD 0.01 per GB of data transfer.
- Amazon S3 One Zone – Infrequent Access – This tier is similar to S3 – IA but is considerably less costly as the data is stored in a single availability zone with lower resilience. Hence, One-Zone IA is an excellent choice for secondary backup storage.
- Amazon Glacier – This tier is meant for data that is retained for over 90 days, such as cold data or backup data. The glacier is as reliable as standard S3 however it requires more time for retrieving stored data, as much as 3 to 5 hours.
3 – Choose the Correct Instance Type
It is essential to use the most cost-effective instances as different instances cost varying amounts. Make sure to select the best-suited instances for your applications work.
To optimize spending–to-workload ratio, you can take into account the type of processing unit and memory volume required for minimizing your expenses.
Conclusion
Cutting back on your cloud computing services with the help of our AWS cost reduction strategies will not only boost productivity but also add to the bottom line.