Show Me the Money!

At the time of building applications and workloads on AWS, you need to take control of the economic model of your architecture. It’s also important to think about the basic pricing, as compared to the on-premises data centers. This can help you in reducing your AWS bill efficiently. There are 5 basic concepts that can help you reduce the AWS costs:

1: Shutdown unused AWS Resources

In order to optimize the cost of your AWS bill, you need to shut down the unused AWS resources, especially in the development environments which means at the end of the day and weekend. Services such as AWS OpWorks and Elastic Beanstalk allow the developers to deploy and redeploy the applications with full consistency without worrying about the configuration of the underlying infrastructure.

By the full utilization of the AWS Cloud network for your infrastructure, it’s very easy for the developers to deploy and redeploy their AWS resources to quickly build and re-build their environment. This main approach towards cloud computing helps in efficient usage of AWS resources and hence deleting the unused resources without any concern.

2: Use the appropriate storage class

There are 5 tiers of Amazon S3 storage available, and it’s important to know how and when to use each class in order to optimize your cost. For each tier, the cost is broken down into the actual storage amount, the number of HTTP PUT requests, the number of HTTP GET requests, and the volume of data transferred.

• Amazon S3 Standard is for general purpose usage for frequently accessed data, and is used for a variety of use cases. As being part of the AWS Free Usage Tier customers receive the 5GB of Amazon S3 Storage, 20,000 Get Requests, 2,000 Put Requests and 15GB of data transfer each month.
• Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (IA) is basically for the data that is less used but requires the same resiliency as the storage class and can be retrieved rapidly when needed. When the S3-IA pricing is less than the standard S3 tier, you are being charged the free trial of $0.01 per GB.
• Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access is almost similar to S3-IA but is even less expensive since the data is only stored in the single availability zone with less resiliency. Because of which One-Zone is the best option for the secondary backup.
• Amazon Glacier is used for the data that is stored for more than 90 days, such as backup or cold data. A glacier is as durable as the standard S3, but the trade-off with this is that it takes 3-5 days in the restoring of data. AWS has also recently introduced two new options for the backup of data from Glacier- including slower and cheaper bulk retrievals (5-12 hours), plus faster and more expensive expedited retrievals (1-5 minutes).

To optimize the cost of your data storage, one should consider implementing object lifecycle management that automatically transmits data between the storage class. For instance, you can automatically move your data from S3 Standard to IA after 30 days, archive data to Glacier after 90 days, or set up an expired policy to delete the objects after 180 days.

3: Select the Right Instance Type

Since different instance families cost different amounts, it’s important to see whether you are using cost-effective instances. Be sure to select the best instance that can suit your application workload.

In order to maximize the workload along with you spend, consider your specific use case while determining the factors like the type of processing unit and amount of memory required. Optimize the instance resources that result in the delivery of the price-performance for the price. You should approach the choice of instances at least twice a year in order to match the reality of your workload.

4: Monitor, Track and Analyze your Service Usage 

 Trusted advisor and CloudWatch are monitoring and management tools to access your instance metrics. Hence depending upon the data collected you can access your workload and scale your instance size up or down.

Trusted Advisor is an excellent tool since it identifies the idle resources by running configuration checks. Not only this, but these services also provide real-time guidance to the customers in the provision of resources provided by AWS – weekly update on the resources to improve the security and performance and hence reducing the costs.

5: Use Auto-Scaling

One of the main and best advantages of cloud computing is that you can align your resources according to customer demand. In order to maintain variable demand or to maintain all of a sudden traffic spike, you can design dynamically by using auto-scaling – or can add additional resources if needed in order to meet the rising demand.

Auto-scaling not only has the benefit of cost management, but it also helps in detecting whether an instance is unhealthy or not and then terminates the instance on its own, hence re-launching a new version on its own. The set-up process for auto-scaling is very simple and straight:

• Firstly, describe the launching configuration that will be needed while adding new resources to the instance.
• Secondly, one needs to set the minimum and maximum size of group for the number of instances and define the availability zone for the same.
• Thirdly, define the policy with the Auto-Scaling parameter that needs to be triggered when an instance is being created and configure a cool-down period to prevent the additional capacity.

Once you have gone through with these basics, you can master with the advanced AWS tools which help in improving your experience. Along with this it also helps in improving and managing your Cost Explorer, Billing Dashboard, and Detailed Billing Report. By using these tools properly and efficiently you can improve your economic experience and AWS will help in reaping the best out of cloud computing.