AWS Cost Management Optimization
What are some of the TOP ways to minimize cost in AWS?
When business is cruising along and you’re making money; there is not allot of motivation to optimize cost. Covid changed everything. I spend almost 25% of my time now in various discussions that are cost motivated.
Cloud Cost are just part of my overall concerns. I use several tools and partners to achieve an optimal balance. The follow are some of the top concerns I focus on when I consider my monthly cost supporting various platforms and services.
Your milage may vary but I’ll bet several of these topics do resonate.
Right Sized Compute Workloads : There are literally hundreds of articles dedicated to reserve instance, spot instance and emphermality of your architecture. The point: Make sure you are running service on the right sized compute. That you are making use of reserved instances or spot to help drive those cost lower. More on this later…
Minimize Data Transfer Cost: You have your app servers in one availability zone and your service architecture in another. You were smart about your VPC setup for high availability and when business was booming inter-zone AZ data movement was not a big concern. Today, its one of you biggest cost. Try compressing your data if your service allows or moving the applications closer to the service.
S3 Bucket Policy Optimization: This one always makes me laugh. I remember not setting these on some of my architectures when I was working at Amazon and did I pay the price of being singled out during my brown bag reviews. I learned the hard way. Don’t put your self through that.. go through each bucket and make it a point to review your bucket policies often. There are tools like policy generator and aws command line that can help you automate some of this work. Stop wasting money on Glacier API calls because of a bad policy setting.
Right Size Data Storage and Tiered Data Storage: This is another easy one but it takes time to implement. If your service supports tiered storage and you can move away from spinning disk to a combination of storage — do it. You may pay a higher price for SSD but hopefully you will be using a whole lot less SSD storage by moving cooler data to warm and cold storage options. For me, it was little difficult to get passed having to pay higher prices for faster storage then to see the “forest through the trees” on the cooler storage. I got over it quickly when my overall storage cost dropped significantly. Again, your mileage my vary. It depends on several factors.
So, I’ve shared some of my favorites. I will be deep diving a few of these in future articles. If you have questions or would like to learn more; Please contact Advantis Data Services for more information. ADG will partner with you to help reduce your cost via a monthly subscription and take guess work out of AWS cost managment.
