Cost saving techniques…
| Negotiate with AWS | AWS account managers are able to offer credits against your account. Although often such credits are centred around start-ups. For instance one customer with a $665K annual spend received a $100K credit to their account when they suggested they were considering moving to google cloud to reduce costs. |
| Choose AWS Support Type Wisely | AWS Enterprise support and AWS Business Support have almost identical service levels such as PROD down service level of 1 hr. The differences being Enterprise support adds in a 15 minute response for Business Critical systems only, and access to free online training, concierge support. In cost terms though for $1M of AWS usage Enterprise would cost $64,500 with AWS Business Support at $36,000. Make sure the support for any AWS account suits the business needs. |
| AWS Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator | Use the TCO tool to estimate how much different setups would cost you. Look at what you want to do and try out different setups to investigate alternative costs. |
| AWS Budgets | AWS Budgets lets you set and enforce budgets for specific Amazon services, and receive emails or messages from the Simple Notification Service (SNS) when budgets are reached or exceeded. It can alert when reserved instances are not being utilized. Be aware budgets have a $0.02 a day cost per budget set. |
| AWS Cost Explorer | Cost explorer allows you to view usage, costs, and return on investment for Amazon services. It shows data for the past 13 months and helps you forecast future spend. Create customized views that can help you analyse your costs and identify areas for improvement. |
| AWS Trusted Advisor | An automatic tool that provides guidance on best practices for your Amazon services. One of the five areas checked by Trusted Advisor is cost optimization. |
| Consolidated billing | You can combine service usage across all AWS accounts within your organization (from multiple accounts) to share volume pricing discounts and Reserved Instance discounts. This can result in a lower charge for your project, department, or company when compared to individual standalone accounts. |
| AWS well-architected tool | Made up out of five main pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimization. The process reviews various core strategies and best practices for architecting systems in the Cloud. It’s used by AWS and their Solutions Architects to perform Well-architected reviews on customer infrastructures. While it reviews best practice, it is also focussed on ensuring any solution is AWS based. |
| Amazon CloudWatch | Lets you set alarms based on a large variety of metrics captured from your Amazon services. CloudWatch is commonly used for cost optimization. For example, you can set up an alarm and notification when an EC2 instance’s utilization goes below 30%, investigate why the instance is underused, and take action to right-size the instance or combine workloads. |
| CloudWatch automated actions | CloudWatch can be used for many things. Unlike most (AWS) tools (like the ones mentioned above), which are mainly informative, CloudWatch offers so-called automated actions, enabling us to take immediate action when a certain threshold has been reached or breached. |
| AWS instance schedular | Lets you configure start and stop schedules for EC2 instances as well as Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) instances |
| Automated builds on demand – CloudFormation templates | Environments should be built on demand. With scripted build and removal of the infrastructure. |
| Implement an AWS cost-saving routine / Programme | A process is needed within the organisation that focuses on reviewing the infrastructure on a regular basis and ensuring cost savings are being targeted. Otherwise cloud infrastructure will constantly increase and drive up AWS costs. Budget holders need to be aware of the cost of their AWS infrastructure. Reviewing it in the context of the service benefits that it provides. |
| Prevent cloud sprawl | When organizations fail to eliminate cloud services that are no longer part of their overall strategy, they still continue to pay for them. Establish proper visibility into your cloud environment with infrastructure and application monitoring and management tools. Set up company policies on how and when to decommission cloud resources that are no longer needed. |
| Analyse Amazon DynamoDB usage and reduce cost by leveraging Autoscaling or On-demand | Analyse your DynamoDB usage by monitoring 2 metrics, ConsumedReadCapacityUnits and ConsumedWriteCapacityUnits, in CloudWatch. To automatically scale (in and out) your DynamoDB table, use the AutoScaling feature. You can enable as appropriate AutoScaling on your existing tables. |
| Review networking and reduce costs by deleting idle load balancers | Use the Trusted Advisor Idle Load Balancers check to get a report of load balancers that have RequestCount of less than 100 over the past 7 days. Then take a decision on removing or even sharing these load balancers to reduce costs. ALB’s are charged at an hourly rate and therfore removing idle ALB’s will save money. This would also reduce WAF costs which are driven in part by the number of rules created. |
| Data Transfer costs – Between AZ’s / Regions | When transferring data between AZ’s you pay double the list price advertised. For instance if the price is $0.01 per GB, then to transfer 2000GB from AZ1 to AZ2 to you would pay: AZ1 sending the data $20 ($0.01 x 2000GB) and the same $20 in AZ2 to receive the data. Use single AZ instead of multi-AZ where large amounts of data are regularly being transferred. Similarly avoid or stop data transfer between regions. |
| Use CloudFront | AWS charges for transferrring data from its platforms such as EC2 to the internet. For companies that supply large amounts of image or movies this can be a large costs. Data transfers from EC2 to CloudFront are free. If you move high volumes of data to your users then CloudFront can help keep those transfer costs down. This action will also improve the performance of your application and reduce overall latency. |
| Identify Amazon EBS volumes with low-utilization and reduce cost by snapshotting then deleting them | EBS volumes that have very low activity (less than 1 IOPS per day) over a period of 7 days indicate that they are probably not in use. Identify these volumes using the Trusted Advisor Underutilized Amazon EBS Volumes Check. Then ask application owners if they are no longer needed or can at least be archived to cheaper backup storage. |
| EBS Type — SSD x Magnetic / IOPS | Choose Magnetic over SSD whenever possible. Where IOPS is turned on this increases storage costs significantly, so it needs to be ensured that the IOPS is being utilized and still warranted. |
| EBS Size — Reduce Oversized Volumes | It’s common to have oversized volumes and unused capacity. |
| Terminate Instances — Stop will keep EBS Costs | Stopping an instance will not prevent you from having EBS costs. If you don’t need the instance and the data anymore, terminate the instance which will remove the storage. |
| Delete Unattached Volumes | Another action that will save you money is merely deleting unattached and unused volumes. |
| Use S3 to backup data | EBS is at least twice as expensive as S3. Where backup volumes are large consider backing up data on S3 and not on EBS. S3 is object based storage, while EBS is block level storage, so this may not fit all types of system. |
| Elastic IPs — Choose Private IP whenever possible | If you choose to communicate using your Public or Elastic IP address or Elastic Load Balancer inside of the Amazon EC2 network, you will pay Intra-Region Data Transfer rates even if the instances are in the same Availability Zone. |
| Identify Amazon EC2 instances with low-utilization and reduce cost by stopping or rightsizing if the instance is oversized. | Report of EC2 instances that are either idle or have low utilization. You can reduce costs by either stopping or downsizing these instances. |
| Use Amazon EC2 Spot Instances to reduce EC2 costs | Spot instances can reduce EC2 costs by up to 90%. Typical workload examples include big data, containerized workloads, CI/CD, web servers, high-performance computing (HPC), and other test & development workloads. |
| Review and modify EC2 AutoScaling Groups configuration | An EC2 Autoscaling group allows your EC2 application fleet to expand or shrink based on demand. Review your scaling activity using either the describe-scaling-activity CLI command or on the console. Analyse the result to see if the scaling policy can be tuned to add instances less aggressively. |
| Use Compute Savings Plans to reduce EC2, Fargate and Lambda costs | Savings Plans helps you save up to 72 percent on Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda usage. Savings Plans provide you lower prices in exchange for a commitment to a consistent usage amount (measured in $/hour) for a one or three year term. Compute Savings Plans automatically apply to EC2 instance usage regardless of instance family, size, AZ, region, OS or tenancy. Use one year, no upfront Compute Savings Plans to get a discount of up to 54% compared to On-Demand pricing. |
| Use Reserved Instances | Reserved Instances offer great deals & discounts, reducing costs by 30-60% and sometimes up to 75% in some cases. One common misconception is that RIs are only for 24×7 workloads. However, in numerous cases, RIs tend to be cheaper even if the instance is running for just 75% of the time. |
| Use AWS Marketplace for Reserved Instances | Companies sometimes have superfluous EC2 instances that are no longer being used and still paying for it. Reducing the list price is a great way to speed up the selling process for that company. |
| Upgrade previous generation resources | AWS launches new instances types from time to time. The new generation instances are more affordable and have more processing power. |
| Select the correct AWS Region to minimize costs | AWS Prices vary region to region. Certain regions are cheaper than others. |
| Select the correct Instance Family | Choosing the family type wisely will allow you to match the instance type to the application requirements. For example a compute-intensive application, may need higher compute power, but lower memory or network. So, acquiring a Compute Optimized instance will allow you to achieve the best price per compute unit. |
| ARM based EC2 instances (Linux) | Arm processors are produced by ARM Holdings PLC. They’re also known as Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) processors, able to produce high-performance quality even though the units themselves are of a much simpler design when compared to Intel processors, for example. ARM Instances are suited to lower compute applications such as web servers. They are around 40% cheaper than the equivalent M5 or C5 instances. However, it’s important to get the workload right. Testing is the most appropriate way to ensure that. |
| DR Solution | Components within DR solutions where a hot failover is not setup should either be spun up on requirement or at least turned off to save money. While this is not possible for all components clever use of techniques such as cross region snapshots can reduce the need for active infrastructure. Such solutions can also help to reduce software vendor licence costs. An example would be an active Oracle DB on EC2 with data snapshotted every 5 mins to DR. The DR instances would only be created on failover, with the database files existing as the Snapshot. This would limit the Oracle Licence implications of a hot standby and may even allow standard OracleDB licences to be used rather than Enterprise which is needed for Oracle based solutions. In addition as snapshot storage is lessaround 50% less than EBS storage the storage costs would be less. |
| Use AWS Savings Plan | Savings Plans are a flexible pricing model that offer low prices on EC2 and Fargate usage, in trade for a promise to a steady amount of usage (measured in $/hour) for a one or three year cycle. When you sign up for Savings Plans, you will be priced the discounted Savings Plans price for your usage up to your commitment. |
| Identify and delete orphaned snapshots | EBS volumes can be deleted, but it’s very easy to forget that your snapshots still remain and continue racking up monthly charges. |
| Elastic Cache — Reserved Nodes | What very few people know is that you can purchase reserved instances for Elastic Cache. The savings that can be made are good. |
| Identify RDS instances with low utilization and reduce cost by stopping (RDS) or shrinking the associated instance size. | Use the Trusted Advisor RDS Idle DB instances check, to identify DB instances which have not had any connection over the last 7 days. To reduce costs, stop these DB instances using automation steps or reduce the instance size as appropriate. |
| Use Reserved Instances (RI) to reduce RDS, Redshift, Elasticache and Elasticsearch costs | Consider using one year, no upfront RIs to get a discount of up to 42% compared to On-Demand pricing. Use the recommendations provided in AWS Cost Explorer RI purchase recommendations, which is based on your RDS, Redshift, Elasticache and Elasticsearch usage. |
| Upgrade previous generation resources | AWS launches new instances types from time to time. The new generation instances are more affordable and have more processing power. |
| Be aware of S3 API costs | Every time you move objects from one S3 storage class to another, you will be charged based on the number of requests. For example moving objects between S3 standard to S3 Glacier will incur a API cost. Typically around $0.05 for each 1,000 Glacier requests. So in situations where the number of objects is high, but size is small it can make a big difference. |
| Analyse Amazon S3 usage and reduce cost by leveraging lower cost storage tiers | Use S3 Analytics to analyse storage access patterns on the object data set for 30 days or longer. It makes recommendations on where you can leverage S3 Infrequently Accessed (S3 IA) to reduce costs. |
| Delete unused S3 data | The most simple and effective way to save costs on S3 is simply deleting old and unused data. Look for old backups and unused S3 buckets. Make the analyses and delete data if possible. |
| Select the right S3 cloud storage option | AWS offers 5 tiers of Amazon S3 object storage available, and it is important to understand why and when to use each class to optimize your costs. New s3 classes such as intelligent tiering will store data based on usage. |
| Inter Region Data Transfer | Store your files locally on S3. Storing in another region will make you incur inter regional data transfer. Backup your data in the same AWS region. |
| S3 VPC endpoint | An excellent cost-saving initiative that many people fail to use is the S3 VPC endpoint. An S3 endpoint is free. Any traffic from EC2 / lambda to S3 would normally go via an internet call resulting in data charges. If you have an S3 end point then its performed via an internal route and AWS won’t charge you like public traffic. Depending on your volume, it’s possible to have reductions in the thousands of dollars per month range with this one method. |
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neilgraham| February 7, 2021
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