Stop Overspending on AWS & Reduce Your Billing — Find Out How?

Reducing your AWS billing is an important step for businesses of all sizes. AWS has a variety of services and features that can help you keep your costs to a minimum. In this article, we’ll provide some tips and tricks to help you reduce your AWS bill.

1. Right Sizing

Optimizing your AWS bill can be achieved by right sizing your instances. This entails making sure that your chosen instances are suited to the workloads they are assigned to. To do this, you need to select the appropriate instance type and size for your applications and tasks.

An illustration of why right-sizing cloud instances is important is when an application requires 2GB of memory but is being run on an 8GB instance. This results in 6GB of memory going to waste, resulting in the user having to pay for something they are not using.

Right-sizing can be done in a manual or automated way. AWS offers several utilities to help you optimise your computing instances. The AWS Trusted Advisor and the AWS Compute Optimizer are two of the most commonly utilised tools.

2. Utilize Spot Instances

Spot instances offer a great opportunity to save on Amazon Web Services (AWS) costs. They enable users to buy computing capacity at a discounted rate, with the spot price typically being much lower than the on-demand one. It is important to be aware that the spot price may change depending on the demand, so one should be cautious when opting for this type of instance.

Spot instances can be a cost-effective choice if you have applications that can handle the potential for interruption. You can set a maximum price for your instances and, if the spot rate goes higher than this, your instance will be halted and you won’t be billed for it.

3. Use Reserved Instances

Reserved Instances are an effective tool for lowering your AWS expenditure. This cost-saving measure offers discounted prices on compute capacity, based on the type of instance, the period of the agreement, and the payment plan selected.

Reserved instances can be a great cost-saving option if you are running steady workloads over a long period of time. For instance, if you purchase a reserved instance with a one-year term and pay the full amount upfront, you will receive the highest discount available.

The difference Reserved instance and On Demand instance is that?a Reserved Instance is one you rent (“reserve”) for a fixed duration, and in return you receive a discount on the base price of an On Demand instance.

4. Utilize Automation

Automating your AWS operations is a great way to reduce expenditure. Automation can bring about multiple cost savings. One example is the ability to spin up instances when required and to shut them down when not in use. This helps you save money as you are only running instances when necessary.

You can also use automation to scale your instances up or down based on demand. This can help you save money by ensuring that you are not running more instances than you need. Automation can also be used to manage your reserved instances, ensuring that you are not over- or under-utilizing them.

5. Utilize Cost Optimization Tools

AWS offers various cost optimisation solutions to help you minimise your expenditure. Two of the most commonly used tools are the AWS Cost Explorer and the AWS Trusted Advisor.

AWS Cost Explorer provides a comprehensive way to monitor and analyze your AWS costs over time. It offers detailed insights into your expenditure, enabling you to recognize and take advantage of cost optimisation potential.

AWS Trusted Advisor is a useful tool for optimising costs. It offers automated advice for optimising costs, enhancing security, enhancing performance and increasing fault tolerance.

6. Monitor Your Usage

Regularly checking your AWS consumption is a key factor in cutting costs. It is essential to keep an eye on your usage to make sure that you are not using up too many resources or not enough.

Monitor your usage regularly to check for any spikes or rapid increases in usage. If you spot such a change, you should consider scaling up your instances or investing in additional capacity to meet the demand.

As you can see in the above picture the Elastic Beanstalk instance is only using 0.2% of the CPU, which means the instance type is way bigger than the required application.

7. Optimize Your Storage

Storage can be an expensive element of an AWS bill. To keep costs down, it is important to optimize your storage usage to make sure you are not paying for more than necessary.

Identifying and deleting unused storage is the initial step to save on costs. To further decrease expenses, it is recommended to opt for cost-effective storage solutions such as Amazon S3, Amazon EFS, and Amazon Glacier.

In order to reduce storage costs, compression and deduplication of data can be employed. These practices may result in savings of up to 70%.

8. Utilize Free Tier

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a complimentary tier for a selection of its services. This free tier furnishes a specific amount of free use for a specific duration.

Explore more than 100 products and start building on AWS using the Free Tier. Three different types of free offers are available, depending on the product used.

The free tier of Amazon EC2 can be of great help to trim down your AWS costs. It provides you with a total of 750 hours of usage in a span of 12 months. Making the most of this free tier can be highly beneficial.

Conclusion

Managing your AWS expenses is a critical aspect for businesses of all sizes. AWS has numerous services and features that allow you to keep your costs to a minimum. In this article, you’ll find some tips and tricks to help you reduce your AWS bills. Implementing these solutions can help you save money and boost the efficiency of your AWS usage.