10 Ways to Cut Your AWS Costs
Amazon Web Services (AWS), a comprehensive cloud computing platform for businesses, provides various services for managing their data infrastructures as they grow and expand. You have several options to optimize your costs by using an elastic approach as a result of its breadth of services.
Some users, however, find it difficult to track their spending for various reasons. When trying to understand how to reduce AWS operational costs, it can be overwhelming. Workload, incidents, performance, and expenditures must all be monitored, analyzed, and tracked on a regular basis. This article will teach you how to save money on AWS.
Companies can use AWS to reduce AWS bills, improve performance, and effectively manage capacity. Users can improve their economic structure by utilizing various pricing and billing models. While AWS is widely used, many organizations find it difficult to optimize costs.
This article aims to examine the process of planning and making decisions about AWS costs. To reduce your AWS costs, you must understand how pricing models work.
When Should You Consider AWS Cost Control?
It is estimated that $14.1 billion was wasted on unnecessary AWS expenses in 2019. When your bill grows 2-3 times higher than expected, AWS cost optimization is critical, especially if you are working with a limited budget.
Analyze your current costs with an AWS Cost Management tool to see if your current expenses have increased. Wouldn't it be nice to save money and use it to promote or improve your business? Getting a sense of the AWS pricing system may appear complicated at first, so keep reading to learn the fundamentals and get started on the path to a more affordable AWS bill.
Related: 6 Ways Cloud Migration Can Cost You Money
10 AWS Cost Control Best Practices
Before taking any cost-cutting measures, determine the costs of the AWS services you use. Customers can try AWS services for free up to the limits specified for each service under the AWS Free Tier. Here's how to see if you've exceeded the free tier limit.
Then, using AWS Cost Explorer, you can view and analyze your AWS costs and usage. This tool can be used to visually monitor cost and usage at a high level (for example, AWS accounts and AWS services) or on a resource-by-resource basis (e.g. EC2 instance ID). Use the "Monthly costs by linked account report" to identify the most expensive accounts. Determine which services are the most expensive in each of those accounts. You can do this by using the "Monthly costs by service report." Using the hourly and resource level granularity, filter and identify the top resources incurring costs.
You should have a good idea of your AWS usage and costs after reviewing them. Here are ten tactical ways to save money on AWS using existing AWS tools.
1. Deactivate any unused EC2 instances
First, consider how to reduce AWS costs. Even if you stop but do not terminate an instance, your EBS costs will be incurred because the volume is still stored. When you cancel EC2 instances, you also cancel EC2 and EBS expenses. The same is true for other instance types, such as Elastic Cache.
2. Reduce the number of instances and volumes that are too large
Making these decisions necessitates an examination of your metrics. Short-term data should not be relied upon. A month's worth of data should suffice, but make sure to look for seasonal peaks as well. Another thing to keep in mind is that EBS volumes cannot be reduced. As a result, a new volume of the appropriate size will need to be created and the data from the old one copied.
3. Use private IP addresses
Even if your instances are in the same availability zone, you will be charged Intra-Regional Data Transfer fees if you use a public IP address within the AWS EC2 network. If you use Elastic IP addresses or Elastic Load Balancers, you will encounter the same issue.
4. Create a snapshot and delete inactive Amazon EBS volumes
EBS volumes with very low activity (less than 1 IOPS per day) indicate that they are inactive for seven days. To identify these volumes, use the Trusted Advisor Underutilized Amazon EBS Volumes Check. After taking a snapshot of the volumes, delete them (in case you require them later). Snapshots can be created automatically with Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager.
5. Make AWS Savings Plans
If your business is stable and you know exactly what resources you need, you can commit to EC2 and Fargate for one or three years. The agreed-upon usage amount will then be reduced by 30% or more. All items that exceed the limit will be charged at the standard on-demand rates.
6. Use Reserved Instances (RI) to save money on RDS, Redshift, ElastiCache, and Elasticsearch
With one year and no upfront RIs, you can save up to 42% off on-demand pricing. The AWS Cost Explorer RI recommends purchases based on your RDS, Redshift, ElastiCache, and Elasticsearch usage. The parameters should be changed to one year with no upfront payment. For a one-year commitment, the break-even point is usually between seven and nine months.
7. Use the AWS Marketplace to purchase reserved EC2 instances
You can buy reserved instances from AWS Marketplace. Although this can result in even greater savings, it can also be difficult to locate an instance with the appropriate type, zone, and reserved period remaining. After purchasing the instance, you can still change the availability zone, giving you more options.
8. Use Amazon EC2 Spot instances to reduce EC2 costs
You can save up to 90% by using Spot instances if you have a fault-tolerant workload. Examples of typical workloads are big data, containerized workloads, CI/CD, web servers, high-performance computing (HPC), and other workloads. To meet your target capacity, you can use EC2 Auto Scaling to launch both spot and on-demand instances. Spot instances are automatically requested in Auto Scaling, and a target capacity is attempted even if the Spot instances are interrupted.
9. Set up AWS autoscaling
Instances that are rarely used can save you money if autoscaling is configured correctly. By using triggers, you can automate instance starts and stops in no time, and you can even scale instances vertically and horizontally using autoscaling. Autoscaling is one of the applications of spot instances.
10. Determine availability zones and regions
AWS pricing varies by region. Furthermore, data transfers between availability zones are subject to a fee. As a result, if you're wondering how to reduce AWS data transfer costs, you should centralize your operations and use single availability zones.
Need Help Lowering Your AWS Costs?
AWS cost savings include regular monitoring and checkups. Furthermore, cost optimization is difficult and requires patience, knowledge, and expertise.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact Sitech. We are a certified AWS partner and reliable Cloud managed service provider with experience in DevOps, Infrastructure and Architecture Design, MVP Scaling Services, and Infrastructure Migration Services.