How to Keep Your AWS Cloud Bill Under Control in Four Steps

Today, businesses are moving to the cloud at a staggering rate—and for a good reason. Among the many benefits the cloud offers, perhaps one of the most sought after is the promise of cost efficiency. That’s because the utility model of the public cloud is designed to inherently save you money. Rather than having to make significant upfront investments in on-premises infrastructure sized for future requirements, you pay for only the resources you’re using to meet current demand. So, just by moving away from a data center or other on-premises environment, cloud customers can realize tremendous initial cost savings.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) takes cloud cost savings one step further. The company’s massive global footprint, automation and economies of scale allow it to offer customers consistent, substantial price reductions.

This powerful combination of upfront savings and continuous price reductions can help customers save significant money, but it can also cause some organizations to become complacent with their cost management strategy—and like leaving the lights on in a room when you leave, this can also mean you’re needlessly paying for resources you’re not using. Over time, this can lead to cloud costs slowly—or not so slowly—getting out of hand. So, what’s the key to lowering and optimizing costs in the cloud? It starts with staying on top of your environment.

Here are four ways to monitor your AWS cloud environment—while taming your monthly cloud spend in the process.

1. Leverage Reserved Instances (RIs).

According to AWS, RIs “provide you with significant savings on your Amazon EC2 costs compared to On-Demand Instance pricing. Reserved Instances are not physical instances, but rather a billing discount applied to the use of On-Demand Instances in your account.”

Leveraging RIs is by far the easiest way to reduce your AWS bill. You benefit from lower rates for committing to use certain resources for one-to-three years. In fact, you can save up to 75% when compared to On-Demand rates. 

There are several different types of RIs you can choose from, giving you the flexibility to modify the size of your instances over the term of your reservation as well as the option to guarantee the servers you need will always be available to you within a specific availability zone or region. To determine which RI will give your business the right combination of savings and flexibility, you can do your own analysis or work with a modern managed cloud service provider, such as Navisite, that offers cloud cost optimization and FinOps expertise that can help you optimize cloud performance and spend.

2. Rightsize your instances.

A common mistake companies make when migrating to AWS is configuring their AWS servers with similar specs to those they used with the on-premises servers they’re replacing. Migrating in this like-for-like fashion results in a bunch of oversized instances, and even if you’re not using all of the available compute power, you’re still paying for it.

In a world where you can resize a server with a click of a mouse, you no longer need to over-provision your servers to account for future growth. The faster you adjust to the cloud mindset—sizing resources based on current demand—the faster you’ll benefit from performance efficiencies and cost savings.

Here, too, cloud service providers, like Navisite, can help. Navisite’s cloud FinOps experts can monitor the performance metrics for your instances over a period of time, and then determine exactly how much capacity you should purchase to satisfy your requirements today and rightsize your instances accordingly.

3. Eliminate cloud waste.

Equally frustrating as paying for overprovisioned resources is paying for resources that you aren’t using, too. In the context of cloud spend, we call this “waste.” This may sound like common sense, but unless you are monitoring for unused resources, it’s easy for waste to pile up. Common examples of cloud waste include abandoned projects, test environments and workspaces; unused resources deriving from personnel changes; unattached or unused Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes; and elastic load balancers and IP addresses.

Keeping track of resource usage is an efficient way to lower monthly costs—and that starts by taking a careful inventory. You can eliminate much of the tedious work involved in identifying wasted resources by using third-party services and tools that constantly analyze your cloud usage.

For example, Navisite’s AWS Cloud Optimization service can provide you with clear visibility into unused resources and what your monthly savings could be once you eliminate cloud waste. CloudCheckr is another tool that can automatically monitor CPU metrics and network throughput to detect idle instances—instances that have gone unused for a certain amount of time. These third-party offerings can help you detect cloud waste faster and more accurately than if you were using a manual process.

4. Replatform and modernize.

For many reasons, companies are often under pressure to move to the cloud quickly (for example, they’re faced with a closing a datacenter, running out of physical space, launching a new initiative, etc.). And while these “lift and shift” migrations get the job done fast, they can result in a stagnated environment that overlooks many of the benefits of moving into the cloud. 

Working with a third-party partner to replatform your entire architecture, however, lets you take advantage of AWS-native tools like Auto Scaling Groups or Elastic Container Service. These tools make it easier to scale elastically in or out to match your application’s workload—helping you save money by dynamically adding the required computing power when it’s needed and removing it when it’s not.

It’s important to note that while this introduces more flexibility, it does require a bit of upfront investment. However, in the long term, choosing to replatform will not only help you stay optimized for cost, but also augment your scalability and resiliency while reducing the operational burden of maintaining the infrastructure.

Optimize Your AWS Cloud Costs with Navisite

One of the key benefits of the cloud is its flexibility. But along with that flexibility comes the potential pitfalls of taking a “set it and forget it” approach. To ensure true cost efficiency, you will need to regularly reassess your architecture, instance usage and related spend to make sure you’re using your resources effectively—and that’s where the expertise of an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner, like Navisite, can help.

With Navisite, you’ll benefit from buying power that you may not be able to achieve on your own—like discounted rates for services like S3, CloudFront, Data Transfer and AWS Business Support, which we pass on directly to our customers. We also offer powerful tools, such as CloudCheckr, and expert advice to help you maximize your cloud investment. From purchasing RIs and rightsizing instances, to eliminating cloud waste and everything in between, our experts will help you optimize cloud costs and start saving.

To get more tips on controlling cloud costs, check out our eBook, Get Your Cloud Costs Under Control. To learn more about our AWS Cloud Optimization service, contact us today.