How to lower your AWS bill

Today's world situation with COVID-19 (Coronavirus) put many companies in stress from a financial point of view, that's why we want to help you with a quick and simple approach to reduce your AWS monthly bill.

To run a cost-effective workload on the cloud it's one of the five pillars defined by AWS well-architected framework. We will describe best practices to stay effective on the cost management but also few tricks we've learned from the experience.

Expenditure Awareness

Many businesses are composed of multiple systems run by various teams. The capability to attribute resource costs to the individual organization or product owners drives efficient usage behavior and helps reduce waste. Accurate cost attribution allows you to know which products are truly profitable and allows you to make more informed decisions about where to allocate budget.

In AWS you can use Cost Explorer to track your spend and gain insights into exactly where you spend. Using AWS Budgets, you can send notifications if your usage or costs are not in line with your forecasts. You can use tagging on resources to apply business and organization information to your usage and cost; this provides additional insights to optimization from an organization's perspective. Tools: AWS Cost Explorer allows you to view and track your usage in detail. AWS Budgets notify you if your usage or spend exceeds actual or forecast budgeted amounts.

Cost-Effective Resources

A well-architected workload uses the most cost-effective resources, which can have a significant and positive economic impact. You also have the opportunity to use managed services to reduce costs. For example, rather than maintaining servers to deliver email, you can use a service that charges on a per-message basis. By factoring in cost during service selection, and using tools such as Cost Explorer and AWS Trusted Advisor to regularly review your AWS usage, you can actively monitor your utilization and adjust your deployments accordingly. Tools: You can use Cost Explorer for Reserved Instance recommendations, and see patterns in how much you spend on AWS resources over time. Use Amazon CloudWatch and Trusted Advisor to help right-size your resources. You can use Amazon Aurora on RDS to remove database licensing costs. AWS Direct Connect and Amazon CloudFront can be used to optimize data transfer.

Matching supply and demand

In AWS, you can automatically provision resources to match demand. Auto Scaling and demand, buffer, and time-based approaches allow you to add and remove resources as needed. If you can anticipate changes in demand, you can save more money and ensure your resources match you workload needs Tools: Auto Scaling allows you to add or remove resources to match demand without overspending.

Optimizing Over Time

Managed services from AWS can significantly optimize the workload, so it is essential to be aware of new managed services and features as they become available. For example, running an Amazon RDS database can be cheaper than running your own database on Amazon EC2. Tools: AWS Trusted Advisor inspects your AWS environment and finds opportunities to save you money by eliminating unused or idle resources or committing to Reserved Instance capacity.

Our Take

The best practices described above gives you the aspects to be cost-effective, each aspect requires iteration and constant optimization. From Teracloud we strongly suggest our clients make cost-management a part of their development process with month/quarterly reviews. Cost-effectiveness its a moving target and It requires constant adjustment and optimization.

If you want to lower your AWS bill now just schedule a quick call with one of our experts.