Cost of AWS Optimization: 5 Things Companies Can Do to Optimize their AWS Bills

While the Amazon Web Services cloud platform has multiple advantages over traditional on-premise infrastructure, its flexibility and scalability often come at a price of vexingly large usage bills. To keep AWS costs under control and not let them undermine the company’s profit margins, optimization is necessary. You can hire professional services like Dedicatted that are skilled in cost optimization AWS or do the optimization yourself.

Here are 5 things companies can and should do to optimize their AWS cloud costs:

• Rightsize EC2 and RDS instances. It is possible that EC2 and RDS instances are the two most expensive services on the company’s AWS list. By regularly employing the best rightsizing techniques, the company can control its rising AWS costs more efficiently and consistently.
• Stop spending budgets on idle Redshift clusters. Eliminating idle Redshift clusters can help companies lower their monthly AWS costs and prevent the accumulation of unnecessary usage fees. One way to know if a Redshift cluster should be is to see if it meets both of the following criteria for idleness: less than 1 database connection in the past 7 days and less than 20 ReadIOPS and WriteIOPS per day in the past 7 days.
• Remove underutilized network-related resources. Companies that create experiment-specific resources and forget to have those removed after the experiment is over often find themselves paying for tools they no longer use or need. The AWS Trusted Advisor helps identify underutilized resources such as Route 53, ELBs, and EIP and provides recommendations for their elimination.
• Benefit from the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class. S3 standard storage class users often pay for the S3 storage space they do not need. By leveraging the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class option, companies can optimize their storage costs automatically by having data moved to the most effective access tier based on the analysis of changes in access patterns. It is an excellent tool for companies operating data with changing or unknown access patterns.
• Use Amazon’s Compute Savings Plans. Thanks to the flexible Savings Plan pricing model, companies can use EC2, Lambda, and Fargate at a budget-friendly cost. It is possible because users agree to commit to continuous usage for a period of 1 or 3 years.

There are several self-serving tools that companies can use to reduce their AWS expenses. These include using AWS Cost Explorer to understand the company costs, AWS Budgets to control these, and AWS Recommendations to optimize the expenses.