How To Optimize AWS Costs for Your Business

AWS cost optimization is a service that works on the configuration of your AWS resources. It makes reports on whether your resources are in optimum condition and produces recommendations to cut down the cost and improve the performance of your data system.

1. Optimizing EC2 Instances

Let’s begin with these three AWS cost regularization best practices. The purpose of rightsizing is to go together with instance sizes to their workloads.

If you double the capacity when you go up one size, you also reduce the capacity in half when you go down one size. Therefore, rightsizing is only an optimum when best practice is applied there. It’s worth analyzing utilization parameters to find out strengths to move the system to different families (other than “General Purpose”) that better suit their needs.

2. Working in patterns

It’s worth putting some time aside for non-production work such as those used for developing, staging, testing, and QA. With these practices, you will save around 65% of running these instances if you apply an “on” schedule of 8.00 a.m. to 8.00 p.m. Monday to Friday. However, more can be saved too, especially if development teams work in irregular patterns or at irregular hours.

You can apply more aggressive schedules by noticing the utilization metrics to know when the instances are more usually used, or always use “stopped schedule” which can be interrupted when access to the instances is needed. Pointing out that while instances are scheduled to be off is worth the time investment as you’re still being charged for EBS volumes and other contents attached to them.

3. Opting for Reserved Instances and Savings Plans

Choosing Reserved Instances is an easy way for AWS cost optimization. Purchasing Reserved Instances is one of the best practices for AWS cost optimization as we’re going to suggest the effective ways of maintaining a Reserved Instances as an AWS cost optimization best practice—consisting of counting all the variables before making a purchase and then reporting on utilization throughout the reservation’s lifecycle.

4. Delete unattached EBS volumes

Going back to Elastic Block Storage (EBS), when you launch an EC2 instance, an EBS volume is connected to the instance to act as its local block storage. When you move/delete the EC2 instance, the EBS volume is only deleted if you check with the “delete on termination” box when the instance was running. If the box wasn’t checked, the EBS volume is still in the system and restraining AWS cost optimization. These are ways in which AWS managed services can help you.

5. Delete old or obsolete snapshots

Snapshots are an easier way to back up information on an EBS volume to an S3 storage bucket as they only back up information that’s altered since the last snapshot to stop duplicate data in the S3 bucket. Resultantly, each snapshot contains all the data required to restore your data (from the moment when the snapshot was taken) to a new EBS volume.

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