Optimize your AWS cloud Cost like a Pro.

In recent times, the adoption of Private and Public cloud has come as a delightful change, with more companies moving from Datacenters to Cloud Computing. The best part about being on a public cloud such as AWS is that there is no fixed cost and resources are charged on a timely basis. Hence, it is of utmost importance for the companies that they do not over-allocate their resources at the setup and also do a timely review of their cloud spending saving themselves from overpayment.

In these unusual times, companies are looking for solutions and services that can fine-tune the performance and still keep their spending to a minimum. AWS offers Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Block Store (EBS), Lambda, Route 53, VPC which are the main pillars in this cost optimization process. This article majorly deals with EC2 and the four possibilities through which one can utilize them,

1. On-demand: An on-demand instance allows a customer to take full control of its circuition.The customer gets to decide when to launch, suspend, hibernate, reboot, or cancel it. This option does not charge a customer upfront and as the name suggests the pricing of the services is based on the demand for resources. There is no long-term commitment required while purchasing On-Demand Instances. Payment needs to be done for the time the On-Demand Instances are in the running state and this is a fixed price.
2. Reserved Instances: Reserved instances generally offer around 70-75% savings compared to the on-demand option and this purchasing model has 3 options: AURI- All Upfront, PURI- Partial Upfront, and NURI- No Upfront. Reserved Instances allow users to take benefit of a discounted rate and have access to confirmed potential. A Customer will be billed for Reserved Instance usage whether they use it to the complete potential or not. Despite the reduced price, Reserved Instances are non-refundable and proper planning is required while dealing with them. Reserved instances are further classified into two segments: Zonal and Regional. Zonal Reserved Instance is instances that are purchased for a specific availability zone while Regional Reserved Instances is instances that are purchased for a specific region.
3. Spot instances: Spot Instances offer up to a 90% savings compared to On-Demand prices. EC2 Spot Instances will help a customer to take benefit of the available EC2 capacity on the AWS cloud. These are majorly beneficial for fault-tolerant workloads such as Big Data, Containerized Workloads, CI/CD, Web Servers, High-Performance Computing (HPC), and other test & development workloads. Spot Instances can be launched with some required time duration and are ideal for use cases such as batch processing, image or video processing, business data analysis, and testing.
4. Dedicated hosts: Dedicated hosts offer a physical server with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated to a customer's consumption and while giving additional visibility and control over how instances are placed on a physical server. Dedicated Hosts allow a customer to use their existing per-socket, per-core, or per-VM software licenses. To begin using Dedicated Hosts a customer must allocate Dedicated Hosts in their account using the Amazon EC2 console. After this allocation, the Dedicated Host capacity is made available in their account immediately and the customer can start launching instances onto the Dedicated Host.

Conclusion

It is hence recommended locking up a budget using AWS Budgets so that you get alerted when your cost and usage changes. In my next few articles, I will be focussing on Elastic Block Store (EBS), Lambda, Route 53, and VPC, and how these methods will help a customer in optimizing their cloud spend.

We are here to help you, please reach out to [email protected] / aditya.acharya @searce.com if you need further assistance in optimizing your AWS environment. We are here to optimize your cost.- Searce.