How to Optimize AWS Costs

You can optimize AWS costs by tracking usage costs, analyzing the data, and finding opportunities to save and optimize. Track usage costs with AWS Cost Explorer. Use Cost Explorer to identify high-cost accounts. You can check this weekly, monthly, or yearly. This way, you’ll identify high-cost services within each account. AWS uses reports to show expenses per service, even for multiple accounts.

How Do You Reduce the Costs of AWS?

There are several ways to cut AWS costs, including:

1. Reduce AWS Costs with EC2 Instances

AWS users should use Spot Instances, which can reduce EC2 costs by up to 90 percent. In EC2 Spot Instances, you have to specify the maximum price you can pay. Don’t rely on the AWS default on-demand price. And when you have fulfilled a Spot Instance request, you could shave a few dollars off your expenses. In addition, since you specified the price, you will stay within your budget.

2. Optimize AWS Costs by Scheduling

When are you most productive? Schedule off-times for nonproductive tasks, such as testing and developing. This is essential since a development team may not work eight continuous hours a day, five days a week.

Utilization reports help identify the most productive times. Schedule these as “on time.” The strategy is to be productive, so you can account for every cost in dollars.

3. Eliminate Unused Assets

You can use assets productively, or they will turn into huge costs if left unutilized. If any unused asset contributes to usage costs, eliminate it. Check if you have unattached EBS volumes, obsolete snapshots, and unused Elastic Load Balancers.

4. Use AWS Savings Plans

AWS has compute pricing plans that come at a huge discount. AWS has two kinds of saving plans. A compute savings plan helps users optimize EC2 costs. The second plan, a machine learning savings plan, helps you pay less as long as you commit. To start, sign up for the savings plan and customize resources based on your needs. You can then make a one- or three-year commitment of paying per hour. Once you agree, AWS will apply a discount on all purchased savings plans.

When you combine these tips with the right tools and the right pricing models, you can easily optimize AWS costs.

nOps has a superb version of AWS CloudTrail. CloudTrail has several functionalities to help you optimize AWS costs, from tracking usage patterns to giving cost-reducing insights. However, CloudTrail gives lots of data, leading to information overload. Too much data may hinder implementation. That’s where the nOps CloudTrail dashboard comes in. It has a good user interface, and all features help users optimize costs in short, easy steps.

The nOps CloudTrail dashboard dives deep to extract useful information that can help users make decisions. It’s difficult to extract such insights from AWS CloudWatch alone. The dashboard helps users filter data by region, type of operation, and date. As a result, you can identify the highest and lowest billed months.

You can learn more about the AWS CloudTrail dashboard here.

Related Topics:

AWS Resource and Cost Optimization

Cost Optimization with nOps and CloudTrail

How to Get the Best Out of Your Amazon Cloud Cost Management Platform