One of the advantages of using the cloud is cost savings since you only pay for what you use. However, many companies still waste resources in the cloud, and end up paying for services that they don’t use. A lot of people are stuck in the old ways of implementing IT infrastructure such as overprovisioning and keeping the servers on 24×7 even when they are idle most of the time.
There are several ways you can optimize AWS in order to save money.
1. Right sizing
With AWS you can right size your services to meet exactly the capacity requirements you need without having to overprovision. On the compute side, you should select the correct EC2 instance appropriate with the application, and provision only enough number of instances to meed the need. When the need for more compute increases, you can scale up or scale out compute resources. For instance during low-demand, use only a couple of EC2 instances, but during high-demand, autoprovision additional EC2 instances to meet the load.
On the storage side, AWS offers multiple tiers to fit your storage need. For instance, you can store frequently used files/objects on S3 Standard tier, store less frequently used files/objects on S3 Infrequent Access (IA) tier, and store archive data on Glacier. Finally you should delete data that you don’t need.
2. Reserve capacity
If you know that you will be using AWS for a long period of time, you can commit to reserve capacity from AWS and save a lot of money on equivalent on-demand capacity.
Reserved Instances are available in 3 options – All up-front (AURI), partial up-front (PURI) or no upfront payments (NURI). When you buy Reserved Instances, the larger the upfront payment, the greater the discount. To maximize your savings, you can pay all up-front and receive the largest discount. Partial up-front RI’s offer lower discounts but give you the option to spend less up front. Lastly, you can choose to spend nothing up-front and receive a smaller discount, but this option allows you to free up capital to spend on other projects.
3. Use spot market
If you have applications that are not time sensitive such as non-critical batch workloads, you may be able to save a lot of money by leveraging Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. This works like an auction where you bid on spare Amazon EC2 computing capacity.
Since Spot instances are often available at a discount compared to On-Demand pricing, you can significantly reduce the cost of running your applications
4. Cleanup unused services
One of the best ways to save money is to turn off unused and idle resources. These include EC2 instances with no network or CPU activity for the past few days, Load Balancers with no traffic, unused block storage (EBS), piles of snapshots and detached Elastic IPs. For instance, one company analyzed their usage pattern and found that during certain periods, they should be able to power off a number of EC2 instances, thereby minimizing their costs.
One thing you really need to do on a regular basis is to monitor and analyze your usage. AWS provides several tools to track your costs such as Amazon CloudWatch (which collects and tracks metrics, monitors log files, and sets alarms), Amazon Trusted Advisor (which looks for opportunities to save you money such as turning off non-production instances), and Amazon Cost Explorer (which gives you the ability to analyze your costs and usage).
Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/pricing/cost-optimization/