AWS Cost optimization – Cut your Spend Utilizing these Top 6 Free Built in Tools
AWS attracts businesses with the promises of cost savings, premium security, business agility, operational efficiency, and fast innovation. Companies migrating to AWS often start with a lift and shift strategy of moving their on premise systems into the cloud and realize a 10-20% reduction in total cost (that’s just the beginning). Other businesses start in AWS building new systems, focusing on quick time-to-market and wind up spending more than they need to be. The real savings comes in iteratively analyzing and optimizing AWS environments to continuously reduce costs. Our certified solutions architects are ready to save you time and money…schedule a one hour free consultation today.
There are many ways AWS can save an organization money that are not directly related to the resource cost themselves, such as automation, DevOps, greatly simplified maintenance, etc. For the purposes of this article, we’re going to focus on 6 tools built into the AWS platform that focus specifically on resource cost and usage optimization.
- AWS Trusted Advisor
- A live online tool that provides guidance on ensuring best practices are being followed. There are several categories that are monitored for which the tool provides recommendations, such as cost optimization, security, fault tolerance, performance and service limits. For cost optimization Trusted Advisor will identify and recommend reserved instance strategies for many services being used. The tool will also provide Savings Plan purchase recommendations to enable you to save money based on historical use. Underutilized or idle resources that you’re paying for and not using will be identified. Please note the amount of detail in these reports is partially reliant on the support plan you’ve purchased for your account. For more information, see AWS Trusted Advisor.
- AWS Cost Explorer
- A simple to use tool that enables you to visualize, analyze, and forecast your AWS cost and usage over time. There are many useful built in reports that you can start at a high level and drill down into the details. It’s simple to create custom reports, filter and group your data to build visualizations specific to your needs. The Cost Explorer will enable you to do forecasting for future cost and usage. The tool also will help identify and build Savings Plans which can really help your organization save money. In addition to all of this, you can build custom applications utilizing the AWS Cost Explorer API. For more information, see AWS Cost Explorer.
- AWS Budgets
- Gives you the ability to set custom budgets with alerts that get triggered when certain thresholds are exceeded or forecasted to exceed a budgeted amount. It can also be used to ensure reservation utilization is being met (reserved instances already paid for are being used enough to be cost effective). You can track budgets across multiple dimensions and build out custom dashboards. In addition to production environments this can be very useful in development environments to track resources mistakenly left running or over-provisioned for a short test. For more information, see AWS Budgets.
- AWS Cost & Usage Report (CUR)
- Provides the most comprehensive set of cost and usage data available in your AWS environment. You can break down costs by the hour, day, product, resource, and tags that are customizable. The data gets posted to S3 and can be retrieved through the Billing Console or through the API to be analyzed in Excel or any other tabular analytics tool. You can use Athena to query this data ad-hoc and/or ingest the data into QuickSight to bring all the power of that platform to your CUR. For more information, see AWS Cost & Usage Report.
- AWS Compute Optimizer
- A tool that uses machine learning to build recommendations to optimize costs for compute resources. It is based on historical utilization metrics from within the account and from Amazons analysis of running a diverse set of workloads over many years. In addition to providing three sets of recommendations for streamlining costs, it provides projections on expected CPU and memory utilization of the workloads within those scenarios. It’s a powerful tool that is simple to set up with a few clicks and can lower costs up to 25%. For more information see AWS Compute Optimizer.
- Amazon S3 Analytics
- S3 is utilized in many use cases across systems on AWS but it can be difficult to manage costs efficiently without the help of some tooling. S3 itself provides several features to help optimize the use of S3. For a deeper dive, see this post on S3 Storage Management Update – Analytics, Object Tagging, Inventory, and Metrics. QuickSight can also be used to visualize S3 Analytics and provide optimization information. For more information see, Visualize S3 Analytics with QuickSight.
AWS continues to work towards providing more for less by reducing costs and giving their customers tooling to make the most efficient use of their platform. ThorTech Solutions certified AWS continues to work towards providing more for less by reducing costs and giving their customers tooling to make the most efficient use of their platform. ThorTech Solutions certified professional solutions architects are trained on the AWS Well Architected Framework and can work with you team to optimize any aspect of your AWS system.