By Sujay Maheshwari in aws — Jan 8, 2021

How To Reduce Your AWS Cloud Cost?

When the bills from your cloud service provider kick in, we regret the services we subscribed to and used only once in a while. Even an affordable-looking service adds up to the pile of bill money we ought to pay at the end of the day or month. This happens 70% of the time when you or your organization pays for the services barely used. There should be a system that allows us to track and optimize our bills and resource utilization so that we won’t spend a single penny on the resources we did not use.

So, is there any flexible and effective cost management system that can prevent the hole in our pockets? What we want are techniques that will reduce our cloud cost.

How to reduce the cloud costs using AWS?

AWS provides free-tier schemes in EC2 instances and other services for individuals and organizations to get an overview and a practical knowledge of computing, storage, and other services.

AWS has introduced many resources to track and optimize the users’ services to reduce their cloud costs. Hence, keeping track of the services we use and reviewing them regularly can be the best solution for cost reduction!

In which areas can we implement the cost reduction techniques?

EC2 Instances

Instances should be focused on when you aim for cost reduction and can lower the AWS cost up to 70%. Using the Spot EC2 Instances can lower the EC2 cost if your service is fault-free. Within EC2 instances, one can implement services like-

AWS Cost Explorer Resource Optimization – aids in visualization, management, and understanding of the services in use. This report helps us track the low vs. high optimization services and cut the ones, not in use.
AWS Instance Scheduler – Can stop the EC2 and RDS instances, not in use.
AWS Operations Conductor – This can automatically resize the EC2 instances based on the type of usage and cost.
AWS Compute Optimizer – Recommends the list of instances and types we can choose from.

Relational Database Services

Database instances that are not in use can be identified and understood using RDS idle DB instance check by Amazon Trusted Advisor.

Analyzing the DynamoDB usage can help a lot. Amazon’s DynamoDB is a NoSQL type database with high-performance parameters with a more significant service cost. Hence, managing the DynamoDB services can help manage the enormous cost associated with it.

Autoscaling is the one-stop solution to all the points mentioned above.

Using a Redshift cluster check for amazon’s Redshift data warehousing can pause the underutilized CPU usage cost.

Using the Reserved Instances (RI) can reduce the cost of RDS, Redshift, ElastiCache, and Elasticsearch. Adjusting the period of usage as a year requires no upfront cost and on-demand pricing. Also, Amazon Cost explorer’s recommendations for RI-based purchasing can optimize your cost to better levels.

Amazon S3

Coming to the storage cost, AWS S3 is the primary step to optimizing cost. S3 has different types when it comes to utilization type and cost.

A. S3 Standard – 99.99% Availability and multiple availability zones

B. S3 Infrequent Access – Lower pricing than standard but for infrequent access.

C. S3 intelligent Tiering – Uses Machine Learning to optimize the cost.

D. S3 One Zone – 99.50% availability and lower cost option.

E. S3 Glacier – for Data Archiving

F. S3 Glacier Deep Archive – Takes 12 hours retrieval time for data archiving and is cheapest.

Comparing the cost structure based on high price –

A>B>C>D>E>F

Suppose you or your company serves customers worldwide. In that case, the S3 standard will be the one for you and Glacier to archive the data. But you do have a day or half to process the data; Deep Glacier can be the best retrieval option.

But if you serve in a specific region, S3 one zone will be the best option.

If the data is accessed rarely, implementing the Infrequent Access will be a cost-cutting option.

EBS Volumes

EBS volumes are an equally important area to manage for the overall cost reduction. They are attached to the EC2 instances to store the instance data and information.

EBS volumes come in three sizes

General-Purpose SSD
Provisioned IOPS SSD
Magnetic SSD

General-purpose SSD is good to go for the ideal utilization and, therefore, cost reduction

But many individuals and organizations fail to recognize the new EBS volumes and end up paying thousands of dollars. When the EC2 instances are terminated, the EBS volumes attached to them keep on generating bills. Hence, deleting the unattached EBS volume can help reduce the cost. Also, Identifying the idle volumes can be a beneficial step in reducing the unutilized cost.

AWS Snapshots- They are cheaper than the EBS volumes and can copy the data from the EBS. Hence, using the snapshot can backup the unattached EBS volumes. So, managing the snapshots periodically and deleting the unused ones can be a step in the cloud cost optimizing revolution.

Amazon AMI – Can service multi-stational offices and organizations. This virtual machine is cost-friendly and can serve the offices remotely, over the vast region and availability zone.

CloudWatch Service

The CloudWatch service provides the insides and helps in monitoring and managing the cloud. CloudWatch collects data as metrics, logs, or events and aids in visualization using the dashboard. Using Billing Alarm can help notify the cost and services we utilized through email.

AWS Tagging

In multi-departmental organizations, it’s hard to track the employees’ resources and their utilization. Hence, managing costs becomes impossible. Therefore, implementing tagging practices can help monitor the users and their actions within your cloud environment.

Dashboards

Dashboards are the best visual aid in tracking the utilization and cost accompanied by cloud services. Allocating cost tags can help create a cost dashboard, reflecting the cost of the services we use. This way, we can decide to cut off the services, not in use and cost a lot by surfing through the dashboard.

Visualizing the dashboard as below can help monitor the parameters easily –

Service Cost
Daily Cost
Monthly Cost
Regional Cost
Services Used
Users Login

Concluding the cost reduction services mentioned above, and the compilation of the best practices list can help cloud practitioners reduce cloud computing and storage costs.

Review the service utilization and cost associated with it regularly.
Keeping the track of services using monitoring resources.
Checking the storage facilities and updating them based on usage.
Understanding the Cost vs. Utilisation parameter.
Knowing the Cloud Cost changes and cost ratios can prevent the sudden price surge in the cloud infrastructure.
Turning on Scaling services like AWS Schedule, Dynamic, and CloudFormation can cut down the application cost.
Automating the Down-Scaling of your applications in the off-hours can cut a considerable service cost.
Implementing Price list service API and AWS Price list API helps to query AWS services’ cost and pricing.
Updating the services and compliances with the trends in the business and costs.
Awareness Programs and workshops within the organization ensure service and cost optimization from the employee’s side.

Pricing and Cost optimization practices help individuals and organizations utilize the cloud and services to better their services, applications, and cloud infrastructure. Hence, focusing on this area can save a lot of costs and billings.

Just as Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.’ Similarly, taking appropriate steps and reviewing them regularly can be a powerful tool for cost savings.

How can Cloudanix help to reduce your cloud cost?

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