General approach for AWS cost optimization
More and more services are moving onto the public clouds and so are the cost related escalating following are some general approaches that can be taken to optimize the cost of cloud usage.
- Consolidate AWS accounts there should not be multiple accounts for the same company/business unit the advantage with this approach is to gain the volume discounts on usage
- Audit existing high cost per hour AWS components and remove the ones with no utilization or no added value to the business
- Always use a stack where cost is more predictable for example I would prefer a Nginx or Nginx plus as a load balancer over Amazon ALB
- Follow the lean approach start with minimum and scale as you go and need that is the whole purpose of a public cloud like AWS prefer autoscaling
- Find out any unused resources in the AWS account for which we are being billed
- Shutting down the development or test instances over weekend or after work
- Tag all the AWS resources to find out where the most expenses are going in
- Use cloud watch and trust advisor tools
- Make a baseline budget and get billing alerts to keep within the budgets
- Prefer AWS spot instances instead of dedicated instances for the workload that is occasional and not critical as spot instances are cheaper and there is not time bond with such instances
