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Nishant Sharma
Nishant Sharma

Posted on • Originally published at umbrellainfocare.com

Best practices on AWS Cloud for Cost Optimization

AWS cost optimization best practices are the most used keyword for Amazon Web Services users. It is typical to find businesses overspending in the cloud and millions down the drain on unutilized resources and services. AWS cost optimization best practices are a savior. Cut down your AWS bills today!

Here’s a guide to AWS cost optimization best practices that save a lot more. But, first, let’s find out what cost optimization for AWS is.

What Is Cost Optimization?

The term cost optimization refers to a business-focused and continuous discipline that drives spending and cost-reduction while maximizing business value and the final output. It helps businesses obtain the best pricing and terms for all purchases and standardizes, rationalizes, and simplifies platforms, services, and applications. Automation and digitalization of IT services and business operations is a plus. Placing the configurations righteously for managing AWS account and managing the cloud assets that ultimately reduce wasteful spend- are the two essential categories of cost management strategies. Cost optimization techniques lower your AWS bill without compromising application performance or redundancy preparation for disaster management. Cost optimization in the cloud is more of a journey than a destination!

How Is AWS Cloud Built For Cost Optimization

The biggest IaaS provider and a formidable cloud computing resource-Amazon Web Services provides the best-in-class computing resources. One of the crucial reasons behind the success of AWS is pricing. The philosophy of pricing in the AWS cloud is plain sailing. Precisely stated at the end of the day, you pay only for what you use and can start or stop using a product as per your requirements.

What Is AWS Serverless Cost Optimization?

The trending serverless age has become more evident due to its advantages in the past few years. Significant economic growth is the biggest advantage that led to the rise of the serverless paradigm. But, what exactly is AWS serverless? AWS serverless refers to building and running services along with the integration of applications without having to manage the infrastructure. All the activities are performed by the technologies offered by AWS. It is a native cloud architecture that permits you to shift to the cloud provider. Still, some companies fail to save money due to a lack of AWS serverless cost optimization management techniques.

Let us have a look at some effective cost optimization measures:

1.Minimize External Calls

Reviewing and optimizing external calls and function code can have a direct impact on the value provided per invocation.

2.Optimization of Logging Output

It is of utmost importance to review logging level, output, and retention to ensure that they fulfil the company’s operational needs. This helps the organizations to prevent and monitor unnecessary logging and data retention, which further verify that they have a minimum level for workload operations.

3.Optimization of Function Configuration

Optimization of function configuration is proportional to cost reduction. Companies can use different memory sizes to benchmark their functions. Additionally, AWS lambda functions can be benchmarked with different amounts of memory followed by a depletion of overall execution. It will further ensure that the company has the most effective cost-invocation.

Guide to 5 best practices on AWS Cloud for cost optimization

1.Scheduling on/off times

For non-production instances such as those used for developing, staging, testing, and QA, using scheduling on/off times is an asset. It saves 65% of running these incidents if you apply an “on” schedule during weekday work hours. If the development team works in irregular patterns or at irregular hours, there is a possibility to save a lot more. More aggressive schedules can be applied by analyzing utilization metrics that will help you determine the moment when the instances are most frequently used.

2.Purchasing Reserved Instances and Savings Plan

One of the easiest ways to reduce AWS costs is by purchasing reserved instances. Identify underutilized EC2 instances for reserved instances and downgrade their size or shift to a different instance society to turn down the costs. The market trends in cloud computing suggest that purchasing reserved instances is one of the best practices for AWS cost optimization, and with the advent of AWS savings plans, users are no longer required to buy RIs. The right savings plan to handle the flexibility needed for purchasing workloads is your go-to plan for controlling costs.

3.Delete Obsolete Snapshots

Snapshots point out an efficient way to backup data on an EBS volume to an S3 storage bucket. It backups those data that have changed since the last snapshot to prevent duplications in the S3 bucket. The snapshot contains all of the information essential to store the data to a new EBS volume. Individual snapshots do not cost immensely. You can save thousands of dollars by deleting those that are no longer required.

4.Eradicate Zombie Assets

Zombie assets are used to describe any unused asset contributing to the operational cost in AWS Cloud Computing. Unused resources that run continuously can have a substantial impact on your monthly AWS bill. The problem businesses often encounter while implementing AWS cost optimization best practices is finding some unused assets.

5.Upgrade instances to the latest generation

Amazon Web Services provide frequent announcements about the up-gradation of products or features introduced to support specific services. In AWS cost optimization best practices, the announcements are related to the latest generation instances. With every new generation release of AWS, they tend to improve the performance and functionality of the instances compared to their predecessor. It points to the fact that you can either upgrade existing instances to the latest generation or downsize with borderline utilization metrics that benefit you with the same level of performance at lower costs.

The Final Note

Best AWS cost optimization practice is an ongoing process. AWS Cloud needs to be monitored all the time to identify the opportunities that exist to reduce costs by deleting, terminating, or releasing zombie assets. In addition, it is crucial to stay at the peak of Reserved Instances to ensure its full utilization.

This article is originally published on Umbrella Infocare Blog.

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