How To Reduce Your Aws Costs In 5 Easy Steps

How To Reduce AWS Costs?

Welcome back to the Proleadsoft blog! Here we offer the best advice to maximize your business efforts in the world of software and web design and digital marketing. This week, we’ve rounded up our top 5 ways to reduce your AWS costs.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) uses cloud technology to revolutionize the way businesses of all shapes and sizes handle their IT solutions. Instead of investing large sums of money in physical, localized IT hardware. AWS harnesses the power of the cloud to deliver crucial services. Such as web and application servers, database management, computing power, and storage solutions, minimizing your costs versus traditional methods.

However, if your cloud costs are not properly managed, costs can quickly spiral out of control. If you’re feeling sticker shock from your AWS bill each month. Allow us to lend a hand with Proleadsoft’s top 5 tips for lowering your AWS costs!

Right-Sizing – Only Pay for What You Need

Often times the first thing we notice when clients come to us looking to revamp their IT expenditures. That they are paying for a higher level of service than they actually need. If you’re operating a small e-commerce business, you may not need as much storage or computing power. Whereas a large tech company crunching huge swaths of data would.

Above all, your cost expenditures should be right-sized for your business. That is, you should choose the cheapest options available that will meet your business needs. Avoid paying for things like unused data capacity by scaling down your services until the additional capacity is needed.

If you’re just starting out with AWS, it’s a good idea to start small and increase capacity as needed. Since AWS services are completely scalable, you’ll always be able to get more power and storage whenever you need it. Just don’t pay for it when you don’t need it!

Reserve and Save!

Once you’ve figured out exactly what kind of capacity demands your business requires. You can save big by utilizing Reserved Instances (RIs) for certain services. Like Amazon EC2 and RDS to book the capacity of computing power and database management, you need ahead of time.

RIs require a 1 to 3-year commitment but allow you to gain tremendous savings when compared to on-demand instances. You can book RIs in three types:

• No upfront payments (NURI). This allows you to book capacity at a small discount without any out of pocket cost
• Partial up-front payments (PURI). This provides a greater discount with some upfront cost
• All up-front payments (AURI) which provide the biggest discount when prepaying ahead of time.

Taking advantage of these RI options can save you as much as 75% on the cost versus paying on demand. Not only do you save money on the cost of these services, but knowing your expected expenditures ahead of time will help you maintain a proper budget for your AWS usage.

Track Metrics w/Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon provides a fantastic set of tools that can help you keep tabs on your AWS spending. One of our favorites is called CloudWatch. CloudWatch allows you to monitor and track metrics of all kinds for components including EC2 CPU usage and data transfer and RDS database instances.

You can also monitor and store logs for troubleshooting your applications and much more at no additional charge. CloudWatch can also set alarms so that you receive notifications when you are approaching your capacity limits, and even set actions to be taken when the alarm is triggered. You can also set custom metrics for CloudWatch to monitor the most important aspects of your application’s usage and performance to your business.

CloudWatch essentially gives you a bird’s eye view of everything related to the usage of your AWS resources, so that you can always stay on top of your expenditures.

Take Advantage of Auto Scaling

With new technology comes new benefits, and Auto Scaling is one of the great advantages AWS provides over traditional localized servers and hardware. Thanks to the power of the cloud, Auto Scaling allows you to add or remove instances of components such as EC2 as needed so your applications will run smoothly no matter the demand.

You can use CloudWatch alarms to monitor your usage and increase your computing capacity once designated thresholds have been reached. The Auto Scaling interface can even provide recommendations itself to help optimize for cost or for performance or to find a middle ground in between.

Auto Scaling ensures that your applications will always have the proper resources allocated to perform under any circumstance. Best of all, Auto Scaling is available free of charge. You just pay for the additional resources, as needed.

Stay on Top of your Usage w/ Cost Explorer

Finally, Amazon provides one more handy tool for users to keep tabs on their expenses, called AWS Cost Explorer. Cost Explorer gathers all your historical usage data together in one place, tied together with an easy to use graphic interface.

The data is updated daily, allowing you to gather reports and make comparisons on your usage and spending across your AWS history. You can see your monthly expenditures along with a daily breakdown and line by line cost assessment. Cost Explorer even has a handy forecasting tool, so that you can anticipate future expenses and plan ahead accordingly.

The Final Word

And there you have it, our top 5 tips for reducing your AWS expenses. The folks at Amazon have gone through great lengths to provide users unprecedented access to tools and data that will help you keep tabs on every aspect of your AWS costs. Using these five tips will put you well on your way to maximizing your usage, as well as reeling in your costs.

Be sure to check back with your friends at the Proleadsoft Blog for more helpful tips and strategies to take your business to the next level!