COST05-BP03 Perform a thorough analysis of each component
Look at overall cost to the organization of each component. Look at total cost of ownership by factoring in cost of operations and management, especially when using managed services. The review effort should reflect potential benefit, for example, time spent analyzing is proportional to component cost.
Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: Low
Implementation guidance
Consider the time savings that will allow your team to focus on retiring technical debt, innovation, and value-adding features. For example, you might need to lift and shift your on-premises environment to the cloud as rapidly as possible and optimize later. It is worth exploring the savings you could realize by using managed services that remove or reduce license costs. Managed services remove the operational and administrative burden of maintaining a service, which allows you to focus on innovation. Additionally, because managed services operate at cloud scale, they can offer a lower cost per transaction or service.
Usually, managed services have attributes that you can set to ensure sufficient capacity. You must set and monitor these attributes so that your excess capacity is kept to a minimum and performance is maximized. You can modify the attributes of AWS Managed Services using the AWS Management Console or AWS APIs and SDKs to align resource needs with changing demand. For example, you can increase or decrease the number of nodes on an Amazon EMR cluster (or an Amazon Redshift cluster) to scale out or in.
You can also pack multiple instances on an AWS resource to enable higher density usage. For example, you can provision multiple small databases on a single Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) database instance. As usage grows, you can migrate one of the databases to a dedicated Amazon RDS database instance using a snapshot and restore process.
When provisioning workloads on managed services, you must understand the requirements of adjusting the service capacity. These requirements are typically time, effort, and any impact to normal workload operation. The provisioned resource must allow time for any changes to occur, provision the required overhead to allow this. The ongoing effort required to modify services can be reduced to virtually zero by using APIs and SDKs that are integrated with system and monitoring tools, such as Amazon CloudWatch.
Amazon RDS
AMS
Implementation steps
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Perform a thorough analysis: Using the component list, work through each component from the highest priority to the lowest priority. For the higher priority and more costly components, perform additional analysis and assess all available options and their long term impact. For lower priority components, assess if changes in usage would change the priority of the component, and then perform an analysis of appropriate effort.
Resources
Related documents:
