Cost optimisation
The Cost Optimization Pillar provides guidance on a cost-optimised workload. A cost-optimised workload fully uses all resources, achieves an outcome at the lowest possible price point, and meets your functional requirements. This document provides in-depth guidance for building capability within your organisation, designing your workload, selecting your services, configuring and operating the services, and applying cost optimisation techniques. You can find prescriptive guidance on implementation in the Cost Optimization Pillar whitepaper.
Cost optimisation is a continual process of refinement and improvement over the span of a workload's lifecycle. The practices in this document help you build and operate cost-aware workloads that achieve business outcomes while minimising costs and allowing your organisation to maximise its return on investment.
Design principles
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Implement cloud financial management: To achieve financial success and accelerate business value realisation in the cloud, you must invest in Cloud Financial Management. Your organisation must dedicate the necessary time and resources for building capability in this new domain of technology and usage management. Similar to your Security or Operations capability, you need to build capability through knowledge building, programs, resources, and processes to help you become a cost efficient organisation.
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Adopt a consumption model: Pay only for the computing resources you consume, and increase or decrease usage depending on business requirements. For example, development and test environments are typically only used for eight hours a day during the work week. You can stop these resources when they're not in use for a potential cost savings of 75% (40 hours versus 168 hours).
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Measure overall efficiency: Measure the business output of the workload and the costs associated with delivery. Use this data to understand the gains you make from increasing output, increasing functionality, and reducing cost.
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Stop spending money on undifferentiated heavy lifting: AWS does the heavy lifting of data center operations like racking, stacking, and powering servers. It also removes the operational burden of managing operating systems and applications with managed services. This allows you to focus on your customers and business projects rather than on IT infrastructure.
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Analyse and attribute expenditure: The cloud makes it easier to accurately identify the cost and usage of workloads, which then allows transparent attribution of IT costs to revenue streams and individual workload owners. This helps measure return on investment (ROI) and gives workload owners an opportunity to optimise their resources and reduce costs.
