19/03/2020
3 Tips on How to Reduce AMAZON WEB SERVICES (AWS) Costs?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) uses cloud technology to revolutionize the way businesses of all shapes and sizes handle their IT solutions. Instead of investing large sums of money in physical, localized IT hardware. AWS harnesses the power of the cloud to deliver crucial services. Such as web and application servers, database management, computing power, and storage solutions, minimizing your costs versus traditional methods.
However, if your cloud costs are not properly managed, costs can quickly spiral out of control.
1. RIGHT-SIZING – ONLY PAY FOR WHAT YOU NEED
Often times the first thing we notice when clients come to us looking to revamp their IT expenditures. That they are paying for a higher level of service than they actually need. If you’re operating a small e-commerce business, you may not need as much storage or computing power. Whereas a large tech company crunching huge swaths of data would.
Above all, your cost expenditures should be right-sized for your business. That is, you should choose the cheapest options available that will meet your business needs. Avoid paying for things like unused data capacity by scaling down your services until the additional capacity is needed.
If you’re just starting out with AWS, it’s a good idea to start small and increase capacity as needed. Since AWS services are completely scalable, you’ll always be able to get more power and storage whenever you need it. Just don’t pay for it when you don’t need it!
2. RESERVE AND SAVE!
Once you’ve figured out exactly what kind of capacity demands your business requires. You can save big by utilizing Reserved Instances (RIs) for certain services. Like Amazon EC2 and RDS to book the capacity of computing power and database management, you need ahead of time.
RIs require a 1 to 3-year commitment but allow you to gain tremendous savings when compared to on-demand instances. You can book RIs in three types:
No upfront payments (NURI). This allows you to book capacity at a small discount without any out of pocket cost
Partial up-front payments (PURI). This provides a greater discount with some upfront cost
All up-front payments (AURI) which provide the biggest discount when prepaying ahead of time.
Taking advantage of these RI options can save you as much as 75% on the cost versus paying on demand. Not only do you save money on the cost of these services, but knowing your expected expenditures ahead of time will help you maintain a proper budget for your AWS usage.
3. TRACK METRICS W/AMAZON CLOUDWATCH
Amazon provides a fantastic set of tools that can help you keep tabs on your AWS spending. One of our favorites is called CloudWatch. CloudWatch allows you to monitor and track metrics of all kinds for components including EC2 CPU usage and data transfer and RDS database instances.
You can also monitor and store logs for troubleshooting your applications and much more at no additional charge. CloudWatch can also set alarms so that you receive notifications when you are approaching your capacity limits, and even set actions to be taken when the alarm is triggered. You can also set custom metrics for CloudWatch to monitor the most important aspects of your application’s usage and performance to your business.
CloudWatch essentially gives you a bird’s eye view of everything related to the usage of your AWS resources, so that you can always stay on top of your expenditures.
source: proleadsoft