Amazon Web Service (AWS) users often complain of having to pay more than they planned. Many times, users find that their Amazon services are costing more than they estimated. Although AWS services are incredibly useful and popular, users frequently wish to find out ways that can help them cut down on their AWS service charges. This is where our AWS cost optimization services come handy.
AWS cost optimization
There are increasing instances when companies are over-spending on cloud-based services. The amount of money being spent on unused features of cloud computing is staggering, to say the least. Innumerable businesses struggle to reduce the charges for additional features in their cloud-computing service packages.
IT experts mostly recommend three simple solutions to reduce the cost of AWS cloud services, namely:
- Rightsizing
- Scheduling
- Purchasing RIs (Reserved Instances)
Although these solutions are advised far and wide their impact on cutting down AWS cost is not equally significant. There are plenty of other solutions that are overlooked.
Tips for Best AWS Cost Optimization
Try these tips if you are looking for the best AWS cost-cutting solutions:
1 – Trim EC2 Instances
Trimming instances results in reducing their sizes to the actual workloads. However, instances tend to doubles in capacity with each gradual size increase.
As you upgrade your instance by one level your size doubles up. The same way, rightsizing instances by one level tend to halve their capacity too. Thus, trimming instances work only if there are instances whose optimal utilization is less than around 45%.
However, it is still important to analyze utilization metrics and find opportunities that shift workloads to families other than “General Purpose” which are better suited to your needs.
2 – Programming On/Off Times
It is highly advised to program the on/off times for non-production instances, including for development, staging, testing and quality analysis. This helps to save as much as 65% of instances when you program the instance to start at 8 AM and end at 8 PM on workdays.
In addition, you can save even more if the development team works at irregular hours. Applying a more rigorous schedule by monitoring utilization metrics for determining the instances used more frequently is another method. In addition, you can choose to apply a permanently stopped schedule which can be switched on when the instance needs to be used.
3 – Buying RI (Reserved Instance)
Buying Reserved Instances (RIs) is another solution to optimizing AWS costs. In case you do not need to utilize RIs as frequently as you expected, your AWS cost increases automatically. In addition, AWS cost can also increase if you buy the wrong type of RI and even when you buy what you think of as a basic RI only to find out that the AWS cost is more than what the reservation helps you to save.
Hence, instead of buying RI to cut AWS cost, we recommend managing RIs effectively by analyzing variables before buying the RI to help reduce AWS prices.
4 – Remove Non-Committed EBS Volumes
When you launch an EC2 instance an Elastic Block Storage (EBS) is attached to the instance as its local block storage. At the time of terminating the EC2 instances, the EBS volume gets deleted only if you check the “delete on termination” option at the time of launching the instance. In case the box is not checked, then the EBS volume remains in existence and adds to your monthly AWS service charges.
For many companies who are not aware of this, the unchecked instances keep piling up and thousands of unattached EBS volumes get collected in their EBS cloud.
5 – Remove Unnecessary Snapshots
Snapshots are very popular for taking data backups on EBS volume from an S3 storage bucket as it only changes the data since the last snapshot was taken in order to prevent storing duplicates in the S3 bucket. Hence, every snapshot has the essential information which is required to restore data to a new EBS volume.
Normally, only the most recent snapshot is useful to restore data in case anything goes wrong. Although individual snapshots might not cost too much, you can still save significantly on AWS costs by deleting the previous snapshots.
Bottom Line
Follow these 5 expert tips for effective AWS cost optimization and ensure that you pay only for what you use and do not end up paying additional charges unnecessarily.