Working with a cloud service provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS) can help significantly lower your operating costs. But it is important to make sure you are getting the most savings available. Here are four good ways to optimize your cost savings through AWS.
Free Tier Services
The first step to ensure you get the best return on your AWS investment is to utilize one of the more than 100 AWS Free Tier offerings. This is a great way to get an accurate view of your actual usage and workload to benchmark your business needs. AWS has three types of Free Tier offerings: Free Trials, 12 Months Free and some offerings that are Always Free. These include tools for computing, analytics, data storage, productivity, and machine learning among others. This is especially useful to small and mid-sized businesses as well as those just starting to migrate their IT services to the cloud.
Additionally, AWS Cost Explorer can analyze your AWS usage and generate high-level reports that identify the top services with the highest costs. These reports provide hourly and resource details to help identify excess costs with great precision.
Trusted Advisor
The AWS Trusted Advisor tool automatically monitors your account to help you follow AWS best practices. It will identify ways to optimize your AWS infrastructure and make specific recommendations to reduce costs and also improve performance and security. Trusted Advisor can highlight potential savings by examining metrics like EC2 instance utilization, idle load balancers and Amazon RDS database instances, underutilized Amazon EBS volumes, and unassociated elastic IP addresses. AWS estimates that Trusted Advisor has helped customers save over $350 million.
Optimization Tools
AWS offers a wide range of optimization tools such as AWS Config, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS OpsWorks, Auto Scaling, and AWS CloudFormation that can monitor your account to make sure your resources are being used efficiently. Cost optimization is best achieved through an ongoing cycle of assessment, benchmarking, and integration with Operations.
For example, Auto Scaling can automatically scale your Amazon EC2 capacity based on conditions you define rather than on peak usage numbers. Adjusting the number of instances as your demand for resources changes means you only pay for the resources you actually use.
And now AWS uses Machine Learning to track actual usage figures along with billions of other data points to predicatively scale resources based on what your expected traffic will be on a daily or weekly basis.
Savings Plans
Another way to reduce and optimize your IT costs is through one of the AWS Savings Plans. These flexible pricing models provide savings over On-Demand pricing, in exchange for a 1 or 3 year usage commitment.
AWS offers three types of Savings Plans:
- Compute Savings Plans apply to usage across Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and AWS Fargate.
- EC2 Instance Savings Plans apply to EC2 usage and offers up to 72% savings compared to On-Demand pricing on your Amazon EC2 Instances usage.
- Amazon SageMaker Savings Plans apply to Amazon SageMaker and offer up to 64% savings on your Amazon SageMaker services usage.
You can also customize your Savings Plans based on your unique requirements. The recommended hourly commitment amount is calculated based on your historical On-Demand usage, plan type, term length and payment option.
Optimizing Your Cost Optimization
InterVision has further tips and recommendations on how to optimize your AWS investment. Additionally, our Cloud Cost Optimization Service can help you save 30% or more on your monthly AWS costs.
Visit our website to connect with one of our experts or call us at 844-622-5710 for a consultation.
