Laying the Foundation: Setting Up Your Environment for Cost Optimization

Publication date: April 2, 2021 (Document Details)

Abstract

This is the first in a series of whitepapers designed to support your cloud journey. This paper seeks to empower you to maximize value from your investments, improve forecasting accuracy and cost predictability, create a culture of ownership and cost transparency, and continuously measure your optimization status.

This paper discusses the pillars of cost optimization and the key mechanisms for achieving them.

Introduction

The cloud offers tremendous opportunity for increased agility, faster innovation, and lower total cost of ownership. The organizations that are the most successful in moving from on-premises environments to the cloud are those that establish a well-defined strategy for approaching this new IT operating model early in their journey. Moving from a model of large upfront investment in data centers to the consumption-based model of AWS requires changes to tools, processes, and mindsets to ensure that costs are effectively managed.

The most important practice for effectively optimizing costs with AWS is to start early. Although many cost optimization practices are relatively easy to implement in small environments, you need new operational best practices, automation, and organizational incentives to be successful at scale across large environments and enterprises. Establishing these best practices early in your journey can help you establish the right processes and behaviors to ensure success when you hit scale.