How to Optimize AWS Costs

Most companies were spending too much money on their storage. However, they are now slowly shifting towards cloud platforms like AWS. AWS will help you in increasing the utilization rates of your workloads. It will also help you in reducing your overall cloud costs. The new pay-as-you-go model will ensure that you are only paying for the resources that you need. Thus, you can easily increase or reduce your resources. It is better when compared to the traditional up-front hardware purchases.

The AWS is currently the biggest cloud player in the market. Thus, it also benefits its customers due to its sheer size. They are reducing the price of storage and compute services because they have access to more resources. The price of S3 has been decreased by 80% in 14 years. AWS can help you in saving a lot of money. However, you also need to ensure that you are optimizing your AWS costs. This will ensure that you are not overspending. In this article, we are going to share some tips that will help you in optimizing your AWS costs.

1. Shutdown unused resourcesaws

You should shut down all the unused instances. This will help you in saving a lot of money. If you are not using an instance, then you should shut it down. This is very important in development environments as no one is going to work during weekends. AWS is offering various services like Elastic Beanstalk and AWS Opworks to developers. Your developers can use these services for quickly deploying and redeploying your applications. They don’t need to worry about configuring the applications again.

You can use AWS cloud formation for defining your entire infrastructure as a code. Your developers can quickly create resource templates. This will help them in building and rebuilding your development environment. This approach will ensure that your developers can delete the unused resources.

2. Use the correct instance type

Every instance family has a different price. Thus, you should ensure that you are using the most accurate and cost-effective instances. Try to find the AWS instance that suits your workload.

You need to minimize your spending while maximizing your workload. The easiest way to do this is by considering a specific use case. You need to determine the factors like memory required and the type of processing unit you need to use. It is important to re-assess your choice after every 6 months. Make sure that they are matching the current workload.

You should also tag your instance. It is always a good idea to monitor the cost per hour of your running systems. You can use tags for calculating this cost. These results will help your development team in optimizing the costs. There is a very simple to enforce the tagging policy. All you need to do is set up a No tags No instance policy by using the Cloud custodian tool.

3. Monitor your cloud services usage

You can use cloud monitoring tools for accessing your instance metrics. These applications will collect the relevant data for you. You can use this data for assessing your workload. This will help you in scaling your instance according to your business needs.

You can use the rusted advisor tool for identifying idle resources. All you need to do is run a configuration check for finding all the idle resources. This tool will also provide real-time guidance to your team. They will provide you the best AWS practices and tips. Thus, your team can increase the overall security and performance of your services.

You can also use Amazon Cloudwatch for collecting and monitoring files. It will also help you in setting up the alarms. The best thing about Cloudwatch is that it will allow you to monitor custom metrics. You can use a simple API for storing and sending metrics that are important for your applications. This data will help you in taking the right actions. Thus, you can manage wasteful and inefficient workloads.

4. Auto Scaling

The best thing about cloud computing is that you can align your customer demand with your resources. You can easily handle sudden traffic spikes by increasing your resources. The Auto-scaling feature will help you in handling sudden traffic spikes. It will add additional resources whenever you need them. Also, it will remove these resources when you don’t need them.

Auto Scaling will help you in optimizing your cost management. Also, it will automatically detect if any instance is unhealthy. It will automatically remove that instance from your environment. Also, it will relaunch a new version of that instance.

5. Use spot and reserved instances

Reserved instances are actually very beneficial for SMBs. It is a 1 or 2-year commitment to purchasing a reservation of extra capacity. You need to pay less hourly rate on these instances. Companies can save more than 75% of the money by using reserved instances. Thus, reserved instances are better when compared with on-demand capacity. If you don’t need your reserved instances, then you can purchase a shorter duration version. You can also sell your RI on the RI marketplace.

There are three payment options available for these reserved instances. You can choose between partial upfront, no upfront, and full upfront. If you are choosing the no or partial upfront option, then you can need to pay the remaining balance monthly. You can also enjoy the benefits of reserved capacity in services like ElastiCache, Redshift, Dynamo DB, and Amazon RDS.

You can also use spot instances for saving a lot of money. It will bid on EC2 capacity which is currently free. Spot Instances is perfect for applications that need access to a lot of computing resources. Also, you should have some method of dealing with interruptions. The price of these instances will vary according to the current demand.

Conclusion

These are some simple methods to optimize your AWS costs. AWS can help you in saving a lot of money. You don’t need to worry about buying your own equipment. However, you should ensure that you are not overspending on the cloud. Experienced MSPs like Bleuwire can also help you in experiencing your cloud costs. They will help you in optimizing your AWS costs. Thus, you can save a lot of money. If you need more tips regarding optimizing your AWS costs, then you can contact Bleuwire.

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