Lowering your AWS Cloud Bill
In my latest blog post, I am sharing tips for lowering your AWS Cloud Bill. The full post is available on the Cyber Group Inc, website here. I am sharing an overview article with my LinkedIn network below and plan to follow this up with a post about Best Practices for AWS Cloud Migration. Please let me know what you think and your thoughts in the comments below!
COVID - CLOUD - COST
Over the past few months, Covid-19 has altered the norms of everyday life dramatically. A massive rise in cloud adoption has been seen and AWS has been a vast portion of this. We are all moving to the cloud, but are we tracking the cost and budget? Is it impacting our organization?
Many executives say that their AWS bill shocks them, but they feel that they can't do anything about it. During these tough economic times, all businesses need to learn how to reduce and optimize expenses, and this includes their AWS/Azure cloud bill. Without a deliberate approach to architecting in the cloud and best practices surrounding governance, organizations are finding themselves exposed and spending more than initially planned.
(Source Image: Snippet from official AWS website)
Common Cloud Pitfalls
Several reports say that on an average 35% of cloud users express concerns about controlling cloud costs and on average, approximately 10%-25% of the estimated cloud range is not used.
- Uncontrolled spend
- No trackback
- Difficulty understanding pricing models
- Not the right size
- Unknown security exposures
- Lack of continued compliance
- Shortcuts made in provisioning stages
- Not meeting business availability goals and design doesn’t perform as expected
AWS- Migration
Migrating to AWS has many advantages, and it provides lots of features in terms of increased scalability, performance, security, and flexibility, but it comes at a higher price. The reality is that without a proper cost optimization strategy in place, your bills can quickly get out of hand.
AWS - Costs Usage and Design Principles
1. Leverage ‘PAYG’ – Pay-As-You-Go
2. Shutdown unused instances and resources
3. Select the right instance size for your workload
4. Select the appropriate S3/Glacier storage class
5. Use CloudWatch Alarms and Trusted Advisor to monitor costs
6. Use Auto Scaling to align your resources with demand
7. Consolidated Billing provides cost savings
8. Take advantage of Reserved and Spot Instances
9. Delete what’s not needed- eliminate waste
AWS - Cost Optimization and Monitoring Flows
1-Analyze the current state and identify potential quick saving wins
2-Review other AWS financial costs and implement cost-cutting measures
3-Convert actions to policy statements to track utilization, measure progress based on goals and limit waste
4-Monitor resources and refine as needed. Assess the environment for cost-effective resources
5- Having multi-accounts, necessary access controls managed policies to restrict the use of Full-Admin rights. These should be coupled with the billing alerts and scheduled bill reviews should curb the cloud spend.
AWS – Cost Saving Plans and some Third-Party Tools
- We recommend AWS Budget to keep track of your daily/monthly bill budget.
- We also suggest using AWS Cost and Usage Report, which contains the most comprehensive set of AWS cost and usage data available
- AWS also offers a discount model called AWS Savings Plans for flexible pricing for EC2 Instances and AWS Fargate in exchange for a usage commitment (dollars/hour) over a set time period of 1 or 3 years.
- Third-Party Software Tools such as CloudHealth by VMware, CloudChckr, and ParkMyCloud are also used to track and analyze your workloads, bills and resource inventory and utilization.
Time to Save Some Chunks!!
The cloud promised to save you money, but your cloud bills may have increased drastically. To leverage cloud fashion, you need to adopt a cloud-first attitude and mindset by using strategies and innovative ways to compute while preventing cloud sprawl. There are third-party vendor tools as well to optimize your costs (an “extra/additional overhead cost as well”)
To conquer your cloud economics, experts from Cyber Group can assist you and your company/firm/organization to make the right architectural, cost management, and technology decisions.
Acknowledgements:-
- A Warm Thanks to Jeff Beier and Saurajit Kanungo for the motivation
References:-
- Several AWS blogs-articles from website and Medium Posts related to Cloud Bills and Migration Strategies
- A-Cloud-Guru, Cloud Academy, Linux Foundation, CNCF, Dallas-AWS User Group
Principal System Engineer at AT&T
4 年All good points, but often I see from the 10,000 ft level a general adoption of unrestrained cloud development to deliver on overdue service velocity and or migration plans. Development and operational groups will generally focus on what the short term yearly rewards. If governance, security compliance, and cost management aren't part of management reward incentives. Then you'll end implementing some sort automated constraints as a way control cost outcomes. We're not architecting the right balance of Carrots and sticks in regard to cost best practices from cloud plan onset.
AWS Security Training ?? Cybr.com
4 年You make really good points in the article JAY SHAH! I've seen fairly large AWS bills that definitely had room for improvement, but even small deployments typically overlook optimizations that can make a difference over time! Thanks for sharing
Branding & Marketing Specialist | UXC | Application Design & Business Strategy Consulting | Digital Content Creator | Personalized Guest Experiences
4 年Well done JAY, thanks for sharing. Planning and budgeting for these things are crucial for all businesses (big or small)!!
Author | Digitizing Businesses | Growing Technologist | Creating Employment
4 年JAY SHAH - Good one! Anyone either has adopted Amazon Web Services (AWS) or is considering to adopt Amazon Web Services (AWS) but not planning and architecting for a spend level could result in unnecessary surprises.
AWS CSA & DevOps Role Certified
4 年Awesome article on AWS cost estimation! Folks tend to downplay the importance of AWS cost. On the contrary, cost optimization will be prioritized before considering infrastructure.