The agility and innovation unlocked by AWS comes with a catch – potential runaway costs if cloud consumption is left unchecked. Adopting financial prudence through cloud cost optimization, governance and efficiency is key to maximizing returns on investment in AWS.
This guide covers techniques including:
- Enforcing Cloud Financial Management
- Right Sizing AWS Resources
- Utilizing Auto Scaling for Elasticity
- Architecting for Cost Efficiency
- Leveraging AWS Savings Plans
- Building Reserved Capacity Strategy
- Spot Instances for Fault Tolerant Workloads
- Getting Granular Visibility into Spend
- Policy Driven Optimization
- FAQs on Optimizing Spend
Applying these tips will help rein in your cloud bill and realize the true ROI of “pay only for what you use” services. Let’s dive in!
Enforcing Cloud Financial Management
Migrating to the public cloud represents a fundamental economic shift. Embrace cloud financial management best practices early including:
● Resource tagging for grouping and allocating charges
● Configuring billing alerts to notify on anomalies
● Enforcing spending authorization through service quotas
● Monitoring usage regularly to identify optimization areas
● Democratizing visibility into expenses across business units
This governance and accountability builds cost aware culture prompting judicious consumption.
Right Sizing AWS Resources
A common pitfall is overprovisioning EC2, RDS and serverless infrastructure leading to waste. Right size usage by:
● Leveraging monitoring data to derive realistic resource needs
● Resizing instances to better match actual demand
● Consolidating workload volumes onto larger instances where possible
● Vertically scaling up before horizontally scaling out more nodes
● Load testing and benchmarking to prevent overcapacity
Even 20% savings per resource adds up significantly.
Fixed clusters seem easier to manage but get drastically over or underprovisioned for workloads with variable traffic. Embrace auto-scaling groups to trigger automated scaling events based on metrics like:
Utilizing Auto Scaling for Elasticity
● CPU and memory usage thresholds
● Incoming request queues and latency
● Time based schedules to meet daily, weekly peaks
This ensures you only pay for resources needed moment to moment.
Architecting for Cost Efficiency
Certain architectures achieve better cost-performance on AWS:
Serverless First Mindset
Leverage serverless offerings like Lambda, AppSync and DynamoDB by default to eliminate paying for idle capacity when workloads vary. Only pay for actual compute consumed.
Event Driven Microservices
Break down monoliths into discreet event-driven microservices that can scale independently to efficiency handle workload instead of the one size fits all approach.
Embrace Ephemeral Systems
Treat resources as cattle, not pets by rebuilding systems programmatically using declarative infrastructure over manually configured environments. Immutable infrastructure is easier to scale.
Leveraging AWS Savings Plans
Commit to consistent use of services like EC2, Lambda and Fargate over 1 to 3 years and Savings Plans provide discounted rates up to 72% automatically when used. No instance specific commitments required.
Building Reserved Capacity Strategy
For steady state usage of RDS, Redshift or predictable EC2 instances, Reserved Capacity offers discounts up to 75% over on-demand billing rates via 1 to 5 year payment commitments, with greater discounts for All Upfront or Partial Upfront payment. Blend RIs with auto-scaling groups and augment with Spot.
Spot Instances for Fault Tolerant Workloads
Leverage the Spot market to access unused EC2 capacity at discounts over 90%. Define max price then use fault tolerant workloads with flexible start/stop. Savings can be substantial for batch processing or Dev environments where uptime is not mission critical.
Getting Granular Visibility into Spend
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure” rings true for cloud costs. Get granular through:
● Cost and usage analytics across multiple dimensions
● Budgets with custom alerts to notify on thresholds
● Reserved Instance utilization tracking
● Amortized cost comparison across pricing models
This uncovers optimization areas prompting action.
Policy Driven Optimization
Much of cost optimization boils down to adherence. Tools like Cloud Custodian can scan your account and:
● Notify on unused resources past time thresholds
● Terminate stale resources violating governance policies
● Notify if launch configurations don’t adhere to approved patterns
● Validate security settings across deployed resources
Such policy driven automation eliminates waste and enforces compliance.
FAQs on Optimizing AWS Spend
Here are common questions on maximizing cloud ROI:
Should I buy Savings Plans or Reserved Instances?
Savings Plans provide greater flexibility across instance families and services like Lambda and Fargate while RIs focus just on specific instance types. Blend both approaches based on steady state vs variable usage across your cloud footprint.
When does it make sense to use Spot Instances?
For fault tolerant workloads like batch processing, dev environments or data analysis where interruptions are acceptable, Spot Instances make sense for extreme discounts. Set max prices below on-demand rates to reduce costs.
How can I estimate my overall cloud spending?
Take historical usage, identify trends, predict how those extend based on your product roadmap then factor in adoption of savings mechanics like auto-scaling, Savings Plans, Spot etc. This can forecast a budget vs shooting blind.
Is there an optimum cloud management toolstack?
Solutions like CloudHealth Optimize, VMware CloudHealth Suite and AWS’s own Cost Management leverage ML to provide efficiency recommendations and automate policy enforcement beyond just visibility and reporting provided by first generation tools.
Conclusion
Migrating systems and data to the public cloud unlocks immense innovation potential. But realizing the true ROI depends heavily on exercising financial prudence – across architecture strategies, spending governance, improved visibility and continuous optimization.
Adopting the techniques outlined here will help maximize returns over the lifecycle of your cloud journey and contain the infamous variable spending problem that gives finance teams headaches. The savvy application of cloud cost optimization unlocks sustainable value.
