Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the most powerful, robust, and widely adopted cloud platforms with the potential to dramatically reduce your infrastructure costs, deliver faster development and innovation life cycles and increase efficiency. However, mere adoption is not enough. If your workloads and processes aren’t built for high performance and cost optimization, you could not only miss out on these benefits but quite possibly end up overspending in the cloud by up to 70%.
From cloud sprawl and difficult-to-understand cloud pricing models to failing to right-size your environment or keep pace with AWS innovation, you may face many challenges on your journey to optimization. But through the adoption of some best practices and the right help, you can get the most from your AWS cloud.
6 Key Practices for AWS Cost Management
Let’s break down some of these best practices for you:
1. Enable transparency with the right reporting tools
The first step should be to understand the sources and structure behind your monthly bills. You can use the AWS Cost and Usage Report (AWS CUR) to add your billing reports to an Amazon S3 bucket that you own and receive a detailed breakdown of your hourly AWS usage and costs across accounts. It has dynamic columns that populate depending on the services you use. It will be helpful for you to understand methods of AWS cost optimization.
To level up your optimization through deeper analysis, AWS recommends Amazon CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, monitor log files, set alarms, and automatically react to changes in AWS resources.
2. Closely monitor your cost trends
Over time, as you begin to adopt AWS technologies and simultaneously monitor their costs, you will start noticing trends and patterns. Keeping a close eye on these trends on a regular basis can help you avoid any long-term or drastic cost-related red flags. In addition to monitoring the trends, it is also important that you understand and investigate the associated causes for the spikes and dips through AWS Cost Explorer. This is where an AWS Trusted Advisor can be a huge help, as they can give you personalized recommendations to optimize your infrastructure and help you follow best practices for AWS cost management.
3. Practice Cloud Financial Management
Another key factor that helps with effective AWS cost management is AWS Cloud Financial Management (AWS CFM). Implementing AWS CFM in your organization will enable your business to unlock the true value and growth it brings from a financial perspective. For successful AWS cost management, it is essential for teams across an enterprise to be aware of the ins and outs of their AWS spending. You can dedicate resources from different departments to this cause. For instance, having experts from finance, technology, and management can help establish a sense of cost awareness across the organization.
4. Use accounts & tags to simplify costs and governance
It is crucial to learn when to use account separation and how to apply an effective tagging strategy. Be sure to take advantage of AWS’s resource tagging capabilities, and delineate your costs by different dimensions like applications, owners, and environments. This practice will help you gain more visibility into how you’re spending.
5. Match consumption with demand
The flexibility and scalability of cloud platforms like AWS allow you to provision resources according to your downstream needs. When right-sizing your resources to match demand, be mindful of horizontal and vertical overscaling as well as run-time on unused or old resources. You can save significantly on costs incurred from wasted resources, by tracking your utilization and turning off old instances. AWS Cost Explorer is used to optimize AWS costs. See patterns in AWS spending over time, project future costs, and identify areas that need further inquiry, like getting a report of EC2 instances that are either idle or have low utilization, similarly checking EBS volumes and S3 buckets using S3 Analytics.
6. Tap into expertise and analytics for your AWS environment
Seek third-party expertise for technology cost management, instead of reallocating your valuable technology resources to budget analysis. VentureDive offers a comprehensive solution with support and expert guidance to keep your AWS workloads running at peak performance while optimizing your cost savings.
Our Optimizer Block for AWS enables you to cut costs, boost performance, and augment your team with access to a deep pool of AWS expertise. Through constant ongoing cost and performance optimization, you have the confidence that your financial investment is being spent wisely and that you are maximizing performance from your AWS workloads. And with 24x7x365 access to AWS experts, you know you’ll be ready for whatever this changing market throws at you next.
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Looking to get the most out of AWS? Talk to an AWS expert at VentureDive!
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