Why AWS Cost Optimization Should be Part of Your Ongoing Cloud Strategy

Economic benefits are the primary reasons for moving to the Cloud. Unfortunately, many firms, pleased with the initial CapEx and OpEx gains, ignore the opportunity for further AWS cost optimization. They may move their workloads into AWS but retain the strategy they used for hosting on physical infrastructure. Taking this approach will end up costing a small fortune! But this mistake is understandable, what with all the architectural, operational, and financial knowledge in-house technology teams often lack. Or, in-house teams may not have the time or technical know-how to monitor and manage cloud costs. If your firm is in this position, help is available. An AWS Premier Consulting Partner can ensure you get all the scalability and performance of running workloads on the AWS cloud while integrating AWS cost optimization into your ongoing cloud strategy.  

Start by Understanding Your Present Costs

A good AWS cost optimization approach begins by gaining a detailed understanding of your current costs, identifying cost optimization opportunities, then implementing changes. AWS and other software vendors provide tools that help customers understand those costs. However, selecting the appropriate tools, analyzing the results, and making changes can be a significant undertaking. So it’s best to work closely with an AWS Premier Consulting Partner to ensure your approach won’t negatively impact performance or security.

Use Cost Management Tools

AWS provides cost management tools you can use to understand how you’re using resources and to find ways to save. 

• CloudWatch is an effective tool that collects and tracks metrics that provide visibility into resource utilization and application performance.
• Cost Explorer creates custom reports that include charts and tabular data to understand and manage costs at the aggregate, as well as detailed, levels. 
• Cost Explorer also lets you group and filter cost and usage information to identify trends and factors influencing costs, and detect anomalies. 
• The AWS Cost and Usage Report provides the most detailed insight into costs and usage by the day or by the hour. 
• Tools like CloudCheckr and CloudHealth provide detailed billing analytics. CloudCheckr, for instance, is a third-party cost analysis tool that provides billing analytics. They can identify idle resources, unused instances, mismatched Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Reserved Instances, or provide resource re-sizing recommendations. 
  

An AWS Premier Consulting Partner Can Find Cost Cutting Opportunities

An experienced AWS Premier Consulting Partner will help you employ these tools to analyze and understand your current costs. With an understanding of your AWS environment and your business goals, they can augment default cost management and usage reports by creating custom dashboards. Some changes your consulting partner may make include:

• Adding right-size services and instances, identified by performance data, to ensure resources are performing as efficiently as possible.
• Identifying and de-provisioning “zombie” resources or instances no longer in use across your development, test, and production environments.‍
• Replacing monolithic applications with cost-efficient, high-performance serverless options that perform highly specific tasks, such as AWS Lambda functions.‍
• Implementing additional AWS services, such as CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, and CodeCommit, to enable an automated, streamlined deployment process.  ‍
• Considering Spot Instances—unused EC2 instances available at steep discounts compared to On-Demand prices. Spot Instances can significantly lower EC2 costs when you have flexibility regarding interruptions and when your applications run.
  The most effective AWS cost optimization efforts employ technological and financial strategies. With your business goals in mind, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner can proactively identify cost and performance optimization opportunities that consider resource constraints. 
  

Ongoing AWS Cost Optimization Strategy‍

Working with an AWS Premier Consulting Partner is the best way to lay the foundation for an ongoing AWS cost optimization strategy. And although a firm could continue analyzing its costs and implementing improvements, there are problems that can arise when doing it alone. Many businesses end up under-provisioning resources, impacting performance or security, or failing to take full advantage of the appropriate AWS infrastructure. But not when you work with Mission, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. We can help you avoid these pitfalls while lowering costs. And with regular monitoring, you can be sure you’ll never miss out on any new opportunities.