It is that most of the companies are spending way too much of the amount in computing and storage of the data which is indeed not required as well. This is why the expenses of the company get excess and the overall costing to gets increased drastically. It is not at all wrong in saying that AWS services are one of the best cloud services, and its expenses to are at a higher level.
But the same can be reduced if taking decisions wisely and smartly. So, let us proceed further and check on some of the ways out that can help in reducing the AWS cost to a level it can be taken up to.
The shift to public cloud providers such as AWS allows companies to increase the utilization rates of their workloads, while simultaneously reducing their overall costs. Substituting traditional up-front hardware purchases with a more efficient pay-as-you-go model offers significant advantages.
Well, with this said let us continue further and have a look at the ways to reduce the AWS costing.
Close or Shutdown Unused AWS Resources
To optimize the cost, it is very much difficult to shut down or power off the instances that are unused especially in the development environments and that too during the weekend time. Services such as AWS OpWorks and Elastic Beanstalk allow developers to quickly deploy and redeploy applications with consistency, without worrying about the configuration of the underlying infrastructure.
By using AWS CloudFormation to define your infrastructure as code, it’s very easy for developers to create resource templates of your AWS resources to quickly build and rebuild your environments. This approach to cloud computing enables the core concept of ephemeral workloads, making it possible to shut down and delete unused AWS resources without concern.
Using Appropriate Storage Class
There are 5 tiers of Amazon S3 object in which the storage is available. Therefore it is important to know why and when to use each class so as to optimize your costs. For each tier, the costing and pricing are broken down into the actual storage amount, the number of HTTP PUT requests, the number of the HTTP GET requests, and the volume of data transferred.
Amazon S3 Standard
Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (IA)
Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access
Amazon Glacier
Select the Right Instance Type
Since several instances families cost different amounts, it’s important to ensure that you are using the most cost-effective instances. Be sure to select the instance that best suits your application workload.
To maximize your workloads while minimizing your spending, consider your specific use case when determining factors like the type of processing unit and amount of memory required. Optimize the instance resource that results in the delivery of price performance for the price. At least twice a year, assess your choice of instances to ensure they match the reality of your workload.
Tagging your instance is also an imperative best practice. The cost per hour of running systems can be monitored in real-time, calculated using tags, and these results can drive the development team to optimize costs. To enforce discipline on tagging in your organization, you can set up a “No tags? No instance” policy using tools like open-source tools like Cloud
Custodian where instances without a tag are stopped.
Monitor, Track, and Analyze your Services Usage
Trusted Advisor and CloudWatch are monitoring and management tools to access your instance metrics. Based on the data collected, you can assess your workloads and scale your instance size up or down
Trusted Advisor is an excellent tool since it identifies idle resources by running configuration checks. The services also provide real time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices — providing weekly updates to increase security and performance and reduce your overall costs.
Amazon Cloudwatch is a helpful service to set alarms, collect & monitor log files, and automatically react to changes in your resources that may contribute to waste. With Cloudwatch, you can also monitor custom metrics generated by your own applications via a simple API by sending and storing metrics that are important to your application’s performance — and then take action to manage inefficient or wasteful workloads.
Use Auto Scaling
One of the key benefits of cloud computing is the ability to align your resources with customer demand. To handle variable demand or sudden traffic spikes, you can design dynamically for capacity by using Auto Scaling — adding additional resources only when required and turning them off when they are no longer needed.
The benefit of applying Auto Scaling to your application’s architecture isn’t just limited to better cost management. The services also enable you to detect when an instance is unhealthy, and then automatically terminate the instance and relaunch a new version.
Setting up Auto Scaling very straightforward:
Define a launch configuration that describes the resources that will be created when adding more instances.
Set the maximum and minimum size of the group to automatically scale the number of instances, and define which availability zones.
Define the policy with parameters for triggering Auto Scaling in response to an event, and configure a cool-down period to prevent additional capacity to be provisioned when scaling down.
Consolidated Billing
If you have multiple accounts, getting a single bill is very helpful for managing costs and controlling spend. Consolidated Billing enables you to see a combined view of all your AWS charges incurred across all of your accounts.
The service is available at no additional charge — one of your accounts is designated the Master Account. The Master Account pays the charges that are accumulated by all the other accounts in the consolidated billing family. The charges from each account can be easily tracked, and the cost data can also be downloaded in a CSV format.
Over to you
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