Top 3 ways to save money in AWS
Today, the cloud is everywhere. Enterprises of all sizes are moving their workloads to public clouds or hybrid cloud environments to gain flexibility, access new capabilities faster, lower costs and optimise performance of their compute resources. To make this shift possible, organisations are spending millions to migrate workloads from on-premises data centres or dedicated third-party instances into the AWS Cloud. Even though AWS can cost less than private data centres or dedicated third-party instances for many workloads, it’s not exactly cheap. In fact, one study estimated that companies that have migrated their business software to the cloud have spent an average of $65 million. Fortunately, there are ways you can save money while using AWS:
Select the correct AWS services to save money
AWS provides a wide range of services, each designed for specific needs. You can build a complete application on AWS and pay for each service you use, or you can choose to use only a few services. The latter approach can save you money. For example, if you need just a relational database, you don’t need to pay for Elastic Load Balancing and other services that go into setting up a complete application. Another way to save money is to combine AWS services to attain greater functionality than any one service could provide on its own. For example, Amazon S3 can store unstructured data like photos and videos, while using the Glacier storage class is better suited to storing long-term persistent data like financial records and medical images. Combining these services lets you use the appropriate level of durability and cost for each type of data.
Use Spot Instances to save money
AWS bid prices are an easy way to save money while using Spot instances, which are discounted compute instances that are available at a lower rate but with no service level agreement (SLA). To access Spot instances, you create a Spot request to purchase an instance at the price offered by the marketplace. You might save money on compute costs if the marketplace sends you a Spot instance, but your instance might be terminated if the capacity is needed elsewhere. To save money, use Spot instances when you can accept the risk of not having the instances running all the time.
Optimise your cloud resources
Many AWS customers don’t have a full understanding of how their applications are being used, which can lead to wasted resources. To ensure you’re paying only for what you need, use monitoring and analysis tools. For example, you can use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor AWS resources, such as Amazon EC2 capacity and network traffic. Amazon CloudWatch Logs can help you analyse the application logs collected by CloudWatch. You can also use other CloudWatch metrics, such as the number of customers who use your application and the amount of data they upload or download, to make better decisions on capacity allocations.
Conclusion
The cloud offers many advantages to enterprises, but it’s not cheap. Fortunately, there are ways to save money while using AWS, including selecting the most cost-effective AWS services for your use case, and monitoring your workload to optimise it continuously.
