AWS is a great investment for your business, and recent years AWS has invested into making itself more flexible, and affordable than ever. AWS is one of the core platforms that we are seeing businesses leverage as part of their Digital Transformation strategies but the feedback from most executives is that spending can easily get out of control without a clear cost optimisation strategy.
To help you regain power over your Total Cost of Ownership, AWS has implemented several features and services to help organisations like yours stay on top of their spend and save money where possible. In this blog post, we'll explore the five key ways you can reduce your AWS spend.
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With a Compute Savings Plan, you commit to a minimum amount of compute usage (measured in USD per hour) for a 1 or 3 year term, in exchange for a discount on your hourly usage charges. The more usage you commit to, the greater the discount. These savings plans are available for any compute usage that falls under EC2 Instances, Lambda Functions, and Fargate Containers.
There are two types of Compute Savings Plans: Convertible and Standard. Convertible plans offer the flexibility to change the size, family, or operating system of your instances, while Standard plans provide a fixed discount for a specific instance family.
If you are able to commit to a certain level of compute usage, Compute Savings Plans are an excellent way to reduce your overall AWS spend, with some discounts being as high as 72%!
To learn more about Compute Savings Plans and how they can help you save money, please check out these FAQs from AWS!
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Reserved Instances provide a significant discount (up to 75%) compared to On-Demand pricing for EC2 Instances, and can be purchased on one or three year terms. When purchasing Reserved Instances, you have the option to select from several payment options, including All Upfront, Partial Upfront, and No Upfront with various levels of savings depending on what flexibility you need.
Reserved Instances are a powerful and easy cost savings for any instances that are essential to your business, and even have the additional benefit of providing capacity reservation. This means that if you have a Reserved Instance for an m4.large instance in us-east-1, and there is a sudden surge in demand for m4.large instances in that region, your instance will be safe from being impacted by the increased demand (and price).
To learn more about Reserved Instances and how they can help you save money on your AWS bill, check out AWS’s guide here.
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If you're not using your Amazon EC2 instances 24 x 7, then you're probably paying too much for them. A great way to reduce your AWS bill is to setup shutdown schedules for your non-production instances. By doing this, you can ensure that your instances are only running when you need them, and not wasting money when they're not in use.
Not only is there a benefit to reducing cost (Which can be leveraged with Compute Savings Plans), there is also a benefit to your sustainability goals but not using resource power when it’s not needed!
To learn more how to set up shutdown schedules for your Amazon EC2 instances, click here.
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AWS Auto Scaling allows you to automatically scale your Amazon EC2 instances up or down based on demand, so you're only paying for the resources you need. For example, if you have an application that only needs to be running during business hours, you can setup an Auto-Scaling policy that would scale your environment down to 0 instances outside of business hours, and then back up to the desired number of instances during business hours.
Auto archiving helps you keep your Amazon S3 storage costs under control by automatically deleting data that is no longer needed (based on rules and parameters), or moving data to cheaper tiers of storage depending on your lifecycle policy . For example, if you have a development environment that is only used for 6 months out of the year, you could setup an Auto-Archive policy that would archive all resources in that environment after 6 months of inactivity. By archiving unused resources, you can significantly reduce your AWS spend.
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AWS Cost Explorer is a powerful tool that allows you to visualise, analyse, and understand your AWS costs and usage. With Cost Explorer, you can easily see where your costs are coming from, and identify areas where you can save money.
Budget Alerts is a feature of AWS Cost Explorer that allows you to receive alerts when your cost or usage exceeds a certain threshold. This is an excellent way to ensure that you are always aware of your AWS spend, and can take action to reduce costs if necessary.
To learn more about the AWS Cost Explorer and how it can help you save money on your AWS bill, click here!
We hope you have found this overview helpful. 3Gi are an Advanced AWS Partner and a Well Architected Framework partner and can help businesses like yours regain control over your AWS bill and AWS journey. Please don’t hesitate to contact us for a free no-obligation discovery session to help refine your AWS strategy and look to see if we can help you reduce your bill.