Cost Optimization Best Practices - AWS Well-Architected Framework Study Guide

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Practice Cloud Financial Management

• Implement organizational wide knowledge building, programs, resources, and processes
• Align your organization to an agreed set of financial objectives, and provide your organization the mechanisms to meet them
• Improve or build on existing programs and processes
• Use team members and supplement the team with experts in CFM and cost optimization
• Consider including people with supplementary or specialist skill sets, such as analytics and project management
• Ask:
  • How do you implement cloud financial management?

Expenditure and usage awareness

• Attribute resource costs to the individual organization or product owners
• Use resource tagging to apply business and organization information to your usage and cost
• Use AWS Cost Explorer for visibility into your cost and usage, or create customized dashboards and analytics with Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight
• Ensure you use the right level of detail and granularity in cost and usage reporting and monitoring
• Set up billing alerts to notify you of predicted overspending
• Ask:
  • How do you govern usage?
  • How do you monitor usage and cost?
  • How do you decommission resources?

Cost-effective resources

• Use managed services to reduce costs
• Make use of On-Demand Instances, Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, and Spot Instances
• Ask:
  • How do you evaluate cost when you select services?
  • How do you meet cost targets when you select resource type, size and number?
  • How do you use pricing models to reduce cost?
  • How do you plan for data transfer charges?

Manage demand and supply resources

• Supply resources to match the workload demand at the time they’re needed
• Modify the demand, using a throttle, buffer, or queue to smooth the demand and serve it with less resources
• Use Auto Scaling with demand or time-based approaches to add and remove resources as needed
• Actively think about the patterns of usage, the time it takes to provision new resources, and the predictability of the demand pattern
• Ask:
  • How do you manage demand, and supply resources?

Optimize over time

• Review your existing architectural decisions to ensure they continue to be the most cost effective
• Be aggressive in decommissioning resources, entire services, and systems that you no longer require
• Replace or add new components to the workload with new services
• Ask:
  • How do you evaluate new services?

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