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AWS Cost Optimization Checklist

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Are you sure you're following all of the practices and strategies to optimize your expenses? AWS has many flexible methods of keeping your expenditure to a minimum but the myriad of services and strategies could overwhelm you. Check out the list of essential strategies below to see if you've got all your bases covered.

Instances

  • Purchase instances that suit your organizational needs.
  • Buy reserved instances with appropriate duration. Don't reserve instances long-term if you won't need them.
  • Analyze the pricing history of the Spot market at least a week before purchase to know which instances are worth purchasing.
  • Purchase Spot Instances for resources that aren't set up for production.
  • Deploy some Spot instance tools so you don't have to worry about your instances being interrupted.
  • Monitor your instances monthly. Purchase the latest instances.

Scheduling

  • Schedule your instances. Keep them running only on business hours.
  • Make use of AWS instance scheduler or third-party automatic scheduling tools to take the task off your hands.
  • Try to be even more thorough with the scheduling times. If you don't need instances to be running during certain working hours(like lunchtime), then turn it off.
  • Schedule your resources based on their activity. Don't need to keep them running if they are idle.
  • Shut down resources other than instances like unused DB volumes or elastic IPs based on time or activity.

Storage

  • Optimizing your storage directly results in the optimization of your costs. Store your running resources on S3 and move them between tiers according to their activity.
  • Set up a lifecycle policy
  • Use S3 Intelligent-tiering for moving between frequent and infrequent access tiers automatically.
  • Archive your less active resources on Glacier.
  • Archive data backups long-term on Glacier Deep Archive.
  • Backup large volumes of data on Elastic Block Storage. Store your EC2 instances or clusters on here.
  • Applications with high workloads can be run on Amazon EFS as it provides auto-scaling and quick outputs.
  • Delete old snapshots and unallocated disk volumes
  • Delete unnecessary objects and buckets
  • Make use of AWS auto-scaling to allocate the sufficient capacity of storage to the workload
  • Choose open-source operating systems

AWS Cost Management Tools

  • Analyze your expenses with Cost and Usage report.
  • Use Trusted Advisor to see your expense forecast.
  • Figure out unused resources with Trusted Advisor.
  • Keep up with the trends in the market with AWS Cost Explorer
  • Create budget plans for your resources
  • Aggregate the expenses by services you run
  • The individual employees of your organization with cost optimization tools

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