How to Control Your IT Costs in the AWS Cloud?

How to Control Your IT Costs in the AWS Cloud?

The optimization of cloud costs is an important topic; it's easy to be overwhelmed by the number of available services and configuration options inside the AWS cloud. In this article, we will cover basic options that can help you understand pricing inside the AWS cloud.

The cloud allows you to trade capital expenses (such as data centers and physical servers) for variable costs; you only pay for the IT resources you consume when you consume them. Economies of scales enable AWS to offer cloud services that are much more cost-effective than building and managing your infrastructure solution.

Pricing Options

Pay-as-you-go

Pay-as-you-go is one of the most popular concepts in the cloud. It allows companies to quickly adapt to frequent changes in business needs. There is no need to forecast future needs or overprovision IT resources. You pay for the resources you use, when you use them and how much you use them. With pay-as-you-go pricing, your IT becomes fully elastic, helping you focus on innovation and development of your products instead of complex procurement.

Reserved Instances

For certain services like Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS, AWS offers reserved capacity called Reserved Instances. Reserved Instances enable users to save up to 75% over equivalent on-demand capacity.

Reserved Instances are available in 3 options based on the upfront payment:

• all up-front (AURI),
• partial up-front (PURI),
• no upfront payments (NURI).

The most significant discount is available if companies pay all their resources up-front (AURI).

By using reserved capacity, your company can minimize risks, better predict and manage IT budget, and comply with policies that require longer-term commitments.

Spot Instances

For Amazon EC2 service, AWS offers so-called Spot instances. Spot instances are unused EC2 instances in the AWS cloud; they are available at up to 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. Spot instances can be used for various workloads such as big data, containerized workloads, CI/CD, web servers, high-performance computing (HPC), and test & development. Spot instances can be combined with On-Demand instances to further optimize workload cost with performance.

Volume-based Discount

For certain services like S3 and EC2, significant discounts can be realized as your usage increases. As your company grows, you benefit from the economies of scale that allow you to increase adoption and keep costs under control.

Cost Visibility and Management

Real-time Visibility

AWS provides the tools that help you have near real-time visibility of your cost and usage information. These tools are essential to organize your resources based on your needs, visualize and analyze cost and usage data in a single pane, and accurately chargeback to appropriate entities (e.g., department, project, product).

Cost Control

Business and organization leaders have a simple and easy way to access AWS billing information, including a spend summary, a breakdown of all service costs incurred by accounts across the organization, along with discounts and credits.

Flexible Forecasting and Budgeting

AWS provides forecasts based on your cost and usage history; it allows you to set budget thresholds and alerts to stay informed whenever cost and usage exceed the threshold limit. You can also set reservation utilization and/or coverage targets for your Reserved Instances and Savings Plans and monitor how they progress towards your target.

Resource and Pricing Recommendations

AWS offers a large number of options and instances that help you optimize your performances and total spending. Resources optimization recommendation simplifies the technical evaluation process so you can efficiently select the cost-optimized resources.

Conclusion

With AWS cloud technology, you have many options for cost and resource optimization. If not managed correctly, cloud costs can quickly spiral out of control. That's why it's essential to partner with a company such as Heptabit that understand AWS services and available cost optimization techniques.

As an AWS advanced consulting partner, we can help you run a cost-effective and performance-efficient AWS cloud environment based on your specific needs.

If you want to know more about cloud migration, cloud technology in general, AWS cloud, or you want to try AWS services:

• visit our cloud migration service page;
• give us a call at +385 1 3141 562;
• contact our sales department at sales@heptabit.com.

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