Saving on AWS, Nonstop - Feb 2025
Hello CloudFix Readers!
We hope that you have had a great start to 2025! It has been busy here at CloudFix, and have been hard at work developing new Finder/Fixers to help you lower your cloud spend. Additionally, we have some great guests in store for the AWS Made Easy, our AWS web show with Stephen Barr and Rahul Subramaniam.
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In this newsletter:
[MEDIA] - The New Pricing Calculator - An Interview with Meredith Holborn (AWS)?
The new AWS Pricing Calculator (currently in preview), has some awesome new features! Not only can you estimate the cost of workloads, but also the cost of changes such as migrations to a different region, or changing to a new EC2 instance architecture. You can also estimate pre-tax costs of your usage and commitments. Even better, you can start your estimate based on your historical usage data.
Episode links:
CloudFix Jira Integration
The CloudFix JIRA integration is a crucial tool for organizations seeking to optimize their cloud costs, as it bridges the gap between cost optimization insights and team workflows. By providing resource owners with technical and financial information, the integration enables them to make informed decisions about cost optimization efforts. The integration creates JIRA tickets that contain comprehensive information about cost optimization opportunities, including specific configuration changes, historical utilization data, and precise cost savings calculations. This approach helps to avoid "alert fatigue" by presenting cost optimization opportunities in a clear and actionable format that fits into existing workflows. By integrating cost optimization into existing workflows, organizations can make cost optimization a natural part of the development and operations process, leading to more effective and seamless cost management.
CloudFix New Finder/Fixers
DynamoDB Remove Idle Tables Finder/Fixer
CloudFix's game-changing DynamoDB Idle Table Finder/Fixer helps lock in savings by automatically finding and eliminating unused DynamoDB tables that silently drain your cloud budget. Using a multi-step find-and-validate approach, it identifies idle tables through multiple checkpoints - including table age, activity levels, and capacity usage - then safely backs up your data before removal, ensuring zero risk to your operations. The impact can be staggering: imagine 10 idle provisioned tables costing you $600 monthly in unnecessary charges - this Finder/Fixer slashes that to just $3 per month by transitioning them to cold storage, saving you enough to buy that fancy espresso machine for the office in the first month, and lock in a few thousand for the rest of the year.
Optimize Auto Scaling Groups
CloudFix's latest Auto Scaling Group optimizer is a game-changing tool that automatically identifies and implements cost-saving opportunities for your AWS Auto Scaling Groups, typically achieving an impressive 10-15% savings without any performance impact! Using AWS Compute Optimizer's machine learning-driven analysis, this powerful feature analyzes your usage patterns, validates safety requirements, and implements AWS-recommended instance type changes with zero operational overhead. Best of all, you can start optimizing your Auto Scaling Groups today with just a few clicks in the CloudFix dashboard, letting the automated process handle everything while maintaining your application's availability and performance.
Reducing Athena Costs
Finally, CloudFix can help you reduce your Athena query costs by automatically identifying opportunities to optimize your S3 bucket partitioning! Using advanced AI-powered analysis, this tool detects existing partitioning patterns in your S3 buckets and shows you exactly how to configure your Glue tables to take advantage of them, potentially cutting your data scanning costs in half. Best of all, this optimization comes with zero risk to your data or query behavior, making it a perfect way to reduce costs while improving query performance!
Discount Optimization with CloudFix RightSpend
If you are using EC2 on a long-term basis, you know that paying the on-demand rate is the most expensive way. AWS has various instruments to make EC2 cheaper. These?can?be powerful, but you can also lock yourself into a commitment for increasing spend! In addition to CloudFix, we also have RightSpend, a discount optimization engine. RightSend makes use of AWS contractual instruments for EC2 instances to make sure that you get the best possible discount without being locked into long-term contracts. RightSpend is perfect for institutions that have large EC2 workloads.
How to Start with Cost Optimization
Are you facing cost optimization “analysis paralysis”? Don’t know where to get started? It is understandable to be hesitant, particularly when it involves your critical infrastructure. Our suggestion: start with CloudWatch. This can be an overlooked spend area, as it is logging and not something that is actively doing work, like EC2 or Lambda.
To reduce your CloudWatch costs, have a log retention policy in place. Without this, you will be paying for CloudWatch logs indefinitely. This is probably unnecessary and not what you intended. If you are a CloudFix user, we have the CloudWatch Log Retention Finder/Fixer.
[MEDIA] AI, Leadership, and Brain-Computer Interfaces, an Interview with Ramses Alcaide
Tune in for an awesome interview with Dr Ramses Alcaide, CEO and Founder of Neurable. He and Stephen will discuss leadership, productivity, the future of AI, and demo Neurable's flagship MW-75 focus-monitoring headphones. AND, tune in for an exclusive coupon code for AWS Made Easy viewers, so you can try the MW-75 at a great price.
Episode drops Feb 18th, 11:00am.
BONUS:?Use coupon code CloudFix50 for an exclusive discount on Neurable's MW-75 flagship focus-detecting AI-powered headphones. Understand your brain with Neurable.?
Social Media
CEO Brandon Pizzacalla discusses AI-ready content strategies in an insightful LinkedIn post. Make sure to follow him for more AI discussions.
Finally, AWS Made Easy is back for 2025. Make sure to follow us on YouTube!
?Thank You!
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading the newsletter. As always, please reach out with comments, questions, or feedback. We love to hear from you. Check on the CloudFix blog and our AWS Made Easy show for weekly updates!
Best wishes,
Stephen Barr and the CloudFix team