Optimize over time

As AWS releases new services and features, it's a best practice to review your existing architectural decisions to verify they continue to be the most cost effective. As your requirements change, be aggressive in decommissioning resources, entire services, and systems that you no longer require.

Implementing new features or resource types can optimize your workload incrementally, while minimizing the effort required to implement the change. This provides continual improvements in efficiency over time and provides you remain on the most updated technology to reduce operating costs. You can also replace or add new components to the workload with new services. This can provide significant increases in efficiency, so it's essential to regularly review your workload, and implement new services and features.

The following questions focus on these considerations for cost optimization.

COST 10:  How do you evaluate new services?
As AWS releases new services and features, it's a best practice to review your existing architectural decisions to verify they continue to be the most cost effective.

When regularly reviewing your deployments, assess how newer services can help save you money. For example, Amazon Aurora on Amazon RDS can reduce costs for relational databases. Using serverless such as Lambda can remove the need to operate and manage instances to run code.

COST 11:  How do you evaluate the cost of effort?
Evaluate the cost of effort for operations in the cloud, review your time-consuming cloud operations, and automate them to reduce human efforts and cost by adopting related AWS services, third-party products, or custom tools.