AWS Cost Optimization

AWS enables you to take control of cost and continuously optimize your spend, while building modern, scalable applications to meet your needs. AWS's breadth of services and pricing options offer the flexibility to effectively manage your costs and still keep the performance and capacity you require. AWS is dedicated to helping customers achieve highest saving potential. During this period of crisis, we will work with you to develop a plan that meets your financial needs. Get started with the steps below that will have an immediate impact on your bill today.

Choose the right pricing models

Use Reserved Instances (RI) to reduce Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon Elasticsearch Service costs

For certain services like Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS, you can invest in reserved capacity. With Reserved Instances, you can save up to 72% over equivalent on-demand capacity. Reserved Instances are available in 3 options – All up-front (AURI), partial up-front (PURI) or no upfront payments (NURI). Use the recommendations provided in AWS Cost Explorer RI purchase recommendations, which is based on your Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon Elasticsearch Service usage.

Amazon EC2 Cost Savings

Use Amazon Spot Instances to reduce EC2 costs or use Compute Savings Plans to reduce EC2, Fargate and Lambda cost.

Match Capacity with Demand

Identify Amazon EC2 instances with low-utilization and reduce cost by stopping or rightsizing

Use AWS Cost Explorer Resource Optimization to get a report of EC2 instances that are either idle or have low utilization. You can reduce costs by either stopping or downsizing these instances. Use AWS Instance Scheduler to automatically stop instances. Use AWS Operations Conductor to automatically resize the EC2 instances (based on the recommendations report from Cost Explorer).

Identify Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift instances with low utilization and reduce cost by stopping (RDS) and pausing (Redshift)

Use the Trusted Advisor Amazon RDS Idle DB instances check, to identify DB instances which have not had any connection over the last 7 days. To reduce costs, stop these DB instances using the automation steps described in this blog post. For Redshift, use the Trusted Advisor Underutilized Redshift clusters check, to identify clusters which have had no connections for the last 7 days, and less than 5% cluster wide average CPU utilization for 99% of the last 7 days. To reduce costs, pause these clusters using the steps in this blog.

Analyze Amazon DynamoDB usage and reduce cost by leveraging Autoscaling or On-demand

Analyze your DynamoDB usage by monitoring 2 metrics, ConsumedReadCapacityUnits and ConsumedWriteCapacityUnits, in CloudWatch. To automatically scale (in and out) your DynamoDB table, use the AutoScaling feature. Using the steps here, you can enable AutoScaling on your existing tables. Alternately, you can also use the on-demand option. This option allows you to pay-per-request for read and write requests so that you only pay for what you use, making it easy to balance costs and performance.

Implement processes to identify resource waste

Identify Amazon EBS volumes with low-utilization and reduce cost by snapshotting then deleting them

EBS volumes that have very low activity (less than 1 IOPS per day) over a period of 7 days indicate that they are probably not in use. Identify these volumes using the Trusted Advisor Underutilized Amazon EBS Volumes Check. To reduce costs, first snapshot the volume (in case you need it later), then delete these volumes. You can automate the creation of snapshots using the Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager. Follow the steps here to delete EBS volumes.

Analyze Amazon S3 usage and reduce cost by leveraging lower cost storage tiers

Use S3 Analytics to analyze storage access patterns on the object data set for 30 days or longer. It makes recommendations on where you can leverage S3 Infrequently Accessed (S3 IA) to reduce costs. You can automate moving these objects into lower cost storage tier using Life Cycle Policies. Alternately, you can also use S3 Intelligent-Tiering, which automatically analyzes and moves your objects to the appropriate storage tier.

Review networking and reduce costs by deleting idle load balancers

Use the Trusted Advisor Idle Load Balancers check to get a report of load balancers that have RequestCount of less than 100 over the past 7 days. Then, use the steps here, to delete these load balancers to reduce costs. Additionally, use the steps provided in this blog, review your data transfer costs using Cost Explorer.