One of the foundations for business success is cost saving. AWS is geared towards helping organisations in different industries drive cost saving while maintaining top-notch performance and scalability.
In this article, we will present five AWS services that help organisations effectively optimise costs without compromising on functionality.
1. AWS Cost Explorer: Visualise and Analyse Cost Data
AWS Cost Explorer is a powerful tool that provides comprehensive insights into your AWS spending. It allows you to visualise and analyse your costs, identify spending trends, and understand cost drivers. By leveraging Cost Explorer, you can gain a deep understanding of your infrastructure costs, identify areas of potential waste or inefficiency, and make informed decisions to optimise your ongoing spending. The three salient ways to use AWS Cost Explorer to uncover opportunities to step-up cost efficiency of your EC2 spend is through rightsizing recommendations to detect any idle or underutilised instances and to refine charge type based on EC2 instance type.
2. AWS EC2 Auto Scaling: Scale Efficiently and Reduce Costs
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Auto Scaling enables DevOps teams to adjust the various EC2 instances in line with the demand. Setting up and Fine tuning scaling policies ensure that applications have the right resources at all times. The latter eliminated the need for overprovisioning, therefore reducing costs. During stretches of low demand, you can scale accordingly and pay solely for the needed resources.
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is brilliant towards improving fault tolerance via automatic detection and the replacement of unhealthy instances. This same service aids in optimising workload performance and cost by combining purchase options and instance types. It will also increase availability with predictive or dynamic scaling policies with the appropriate compute capacity.
3. AWS Lambda: Pay Only for Compute Time
AWS Lambda is the leading service for serverless computing which allows development teams to run their codebase without first provisioning and subsequently managing servers. The main benefit of AWS Lambda is that only compute time that is consumed by code is paid for. This pay-as-you-go model eliminates the need to pay for idle resources, leading to significant cost savings for your organisation. Lambda is ideal for event-driven workloads, where you can scale your functions automatically in response to triggers, ensuring optimal resource utilisation and cost efficiency. Common triggers that invoke this service include document uploads to S3, scheduled cron jobs, data streaming in a specific timeframe or a notification from AWS simple notification service (SNS).
4. AWS S3: Cost-Effective Storage Solutions
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provides highly scalable and cost-effective storage solutions for your organisation. S3 offers various storage classes, such as Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, Infrequent Access, and Glacier, each designed to optimise costs based on your data access patterns. By using the appropriate storage class for your data, you can reduce storage costs while ensuring high availability and durability. Typical use cases include web portals, smartphone applications, backup and restore, archives, data lakes, IoT devices and big data analytics.
5. AWS Trusted Advisor: Optimise and Improve Your AWS Environment
AWS Trusted Advisor is a valuable service that provides real-time guidance to help you optimise your AWS environment. It is a must-have for DevOps teams. It analyses your infrastructure, identifies cost optimisation opportunities, and recommends actions to improve performance, security, and reliability. Trusted Advisor covers various aspects, including cost optimisation, by suggesting ways to right-size your resources, terminate idle instances, and take advantage of savings plans or reserved instances. This is ideal for monitoring service quotas.
Plan long-term success on the cloud while optimising costs and, more importantly, without sacrificing performance and functionality. This is crucial for any organisation using (or planning to use) AWS. Consult our team of experts to see how best to optimise your AWS cloud environment/s to lower your OPEX.
