3 Ways to Reduce the Cost of Amazon Web Services

Photo by Mikael Schelin

Modern cloud computing resources like Amazon Web Services provide businesses with many valuable tools that enable them to optimize processes and create new value for their customers. With the right cloud resource, businesses can build new revenue streams, boost agility and improve quality. So it’s not surprising that the cloud is one of the biggest trends and investments in business development.

However, despite the myriad of benefits, the cloud can quickly become a cost burden for businesses if it is not set up efficiently. In our work, we help customers track down and eliminate inefficiencies in their cloud environment—and save a significant portion of their IT budget as a result.

How do we do it? Using Amazon Web Services as an example, here are some of the tried and proven ways you can start cutting cloud costs already today. Let's reduce AWS Cloud cost!

1. Reduce the cost of EC2 service

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web-based service that provides secure, scalable computing resources in the AWS cloud. The EC2 service allows you to get the necessary virtual machines or bare metal servers to run your application or the whole infrastructure. As practice shows, a bigger part of the budget is spent on EC2 service. There are several ways you can reduce the cost of your EC2 resources:

• Look closely at the Bills report in the Billing Management Console. Perhaps you have EC2 instances in the regions that you didn't know about?
• Make sure that the EC2 instances are active and really necessary.
• Check EC2 instances type, make sure that the instances type matches the load on the server.
• Ensure you are making the best use of EBS volumes. Most of the time, you don't need much free space for your EC2 instances.
• Check the rules of EBS Snapshot Lifecycle and AWS Backup, maybe you don’t need to store the snapshots for EBS volumes for more than 14 days.
• Maybe you don't need your dev, test or stage environments to be running all the time. With help from the AWS Instance Scheduler service, you can automatically start and stop EC2 instances.
• Perhaps you need different types of EC2 instances at different hours of the day? The AWS Operations Conductor service can help you change infrastructure dynamically.
• Consider using cheaper EC2 Spot instances. You can save up to 90% of the cost, but you must understand if your application is suitable for this type of server.
• Use Reserved Instances if you are sure that your infrastructure will last. Use one year, with no upfront RIs, to get a discount of up to 42% compared to On-Demand pricing.
• With the AWS Compute Optimizer service, you can get recommendations on how to optimize the use of AWS EC2 resources to reduce the costs and increase the productivity of your workloads.

2. Eliminate unnecessary usage of RDS resources

Just like you can optimize EC2 service costs, you have an opportunity to optimize the cost of your RDS service. Here are some possible options:

• With help from the Trusted Advisor Amazon service and RDS Idle DB instances check, you can find DB instances with no connections activity over the last 7 days.
• In addition to the EC2 service, you can use Reserved Instances for RDS instances and save up to 50%.
• Do your RDS resources always need to be working?. With Instance Scheduler, you can turn your databases off and on after-hours if they are not used in production and don’t always need to be running.

3. Optimize the way you access your S3 resources

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is the third most popular AWS service after EC2 and RDS. If you want to have the best scalability, security, speed and security for your files and pay only for the real space you use, then S3 service is the best choice. You can save money by optimizing your S3 service, and here are a few ways to do it:

• Use Life Cycle Policies to automatically move infrequently used objects to a cheaper storage type. You can also move unused files to the super cheap storage AWS Glacier.
• You can dynamically move your objects between different types of S3 storages using the S3 Intelligent-Tiering service.
• Use the S3 Analytic service to get statistics on how to access your objects.

These are 3 commonly used services that can be optimized to reduce the cost of your AWS cloud infrastructure. If you want to get more detailed information or you think your business could benefit from cloud cost optimization?

Don't hesitate to contact us at contact@fastdev.se and we’ll help you make it happen.