Achieving Optimized AWS Costs

It’s a story seen many times before. A company has a cloud-first initiative hoping to save on IT costs, increase agility and drive greater flexibility to tackle business challenges, but when they send their workloads to the cloud, suddenly they see out-of-control spending. How do you drive AWS cost optimization?

There are many complexities that could create overspending in the cloud:

• Unclear cloud cost visibility
• Cloud sprawl in under-utilized of wasted resources
• Difficult-to-understand pricing and billing
• Management and process challenges with governance
• Incorrectly sized deployments on architecture
• Inaccurate forecasting

The problem is that, in addition to these commonly encountered complexities, there’s a misnomer that going to the AWS cloud will automatically create cost savings for an organization. The answer to cost savings in AWS instead, lies in three key areas: 1) architecture, 2) FinOps and 3) governance. In this blog, we’ll cover architecture.

Architecture as a Step to Lowering AWS Costs

By integrating expertise in AWS cloud architecture, governance and FinOps, companies can gain a holistic approach that is guaranteed to save more. Focusing on optimizing your architecture in the cloud is the first step to robust security while setting the foundation to embrace your cloud-first strategy, without financial complexity. Here are a few of the areas in AWS cloud architecture that demand attention in order to achieve cost optimization:

• Infrastructure: Identify AWS services and infrastructure that are unused to eliminate unnecessary spend
• Data Transfer: Identify and target opportunities to reduce data transfer costs based on client use cases
• Compute: Right size compute resources and review pricing models to optimize performance and cost
• Storage: Pinpoint opportunities to minimize AWS storage costs while ensuring availability
• Scheduling: Identify scheduling opportunities to turn up or turn down resources, which can save up to 70% versus running them 24/7.

AWS cost management requires unique expertise in the realm of cloud architecture, and often cloud teams either don’t have the skills on staff or are too busy to focus on the technical and operational processes necessary to control and reduce costs. This issue, coupled with complex billing and lack of visibility into spending trends can result in sprawled workloads, stalled migrations and eroded confidence in cloud strategies.

InterVision’s Cloud Cost Optimization Service

InterVision has officially announced its Cloud Cost Optimization Service backed by a guarantee to identify a minimum of 30% savings for clients with $20,000 or more in monthly AWS spend. To learn more, visit our webpage or contact us here.

 

Read Part 2 of the blog series here. 

Read Part 3 of the blog series here.