AWS Cost Optimization Strategy

2014

Rob Sell

True Story

Cab driver asks me why I am in Vegas. I say, “Amazon conference. You know… the cloud?”

He sighs and says, “I hate the cloud! I don’t know what the cloud is but I know all my music has gone somewhere else and I don’t know where. Even the name is bad. Why did they call it the cloud? It sounds so mysterious. Is it going to evaporate? Those Amazon guys made a big mistake calling it the Cloud.”

“If they were smart they would have called it The Safe! Now that would make me feel better! The cloud… ha!”

Top 10 Recommendations

1. Measure

2. Tag

3. Turn off unused instances

4. Use Auto Scaling

5. Use Reserved Instances

6. Use Spot Instances

7. Leverage Amazon S3 Storage Classes

8. Optimize Amazon DynamoDB Capacity Units

9. Offload your Architecture

10. Review / Further Optimize

Measure

• First step of improving is to measure.

• Ensure “Receive Billing Reports” is checked.

• Predict with AWS Calculators:

– AWS TCO Calculator (compare on-prem or colo to AWS)

• Analyze: Cost Explorer / Usage Report

• Netflix Ice – Free (Open Source) Cost Monitoring Tool

• Article on Netflix Ice on Netflix blog

• Netflix Ice on GitHub

• Cloudability – Commercial Cost Monitoring Tool

Tag

• Tag everything to categorize and track costs.

• Common tags include type of environment, platform and name. I suggest including requestor and project for billing.

• Automate tagging in templates.

• Ensure your tags provide meaningful reporting

• Show back at minimum

• Charge back could be ideal to ensure efficiency

• Tagging can also be used for other cool stuff like Auto-Scaling

Turn off Unused Instances

• Likely your most effective cost reduction technique.

• Turn off unused or underused capacity.

• Reduce instance usage during off peak times

• Turn off test/dev environments when not in use

• Turn off dormant data when not in use

• EC2 Scheduling

Use Auto Scaling

• Scale up or down as needed:

• By schedule

• By policy

• Automate

• From min to max instances

• Triggers to scale up / down

• Load balancing

• Health checks

Use Reserved Instances

• Reserved Instances

• Upfront fee then lower hourly cost

• 1 or 3 year term (42 to 71% cost reduction over on-demand instances)

• Flexible with instance family

Use Spot Instances

• Spot Instances

• Cheap (10% of demand price)

• Not always appropriate.

• Price depends on instance type and the AZ

• Add Autoscaling + Route53 (+ health checks) for failover

Leverage Amazon S3 Storage Classes

• Different classes will have different costs.

• Standard Storage (cheap)

• Reduced Redundancy Storage (cheaper)

• Glacier Storage (cheapest)

Optimize AWS DynamoDB Capacity Units

• Amazon DynamoDB lets you specify the request throughput you want your table to be able to achieve.

• Behind the scenes, the service handles the provisioning of resources to achieve the requested throughput rate.

• Rather than asking you to think about instances, hardware, memory, and others that could affect your throughput rate, they ask the throughput level you want

• In order to optimize your costs across AWS services, large objects or infrequently accessed data sets should be stored in Amazon S3, while smaller data elements or file pointers (possibly to Amazon S3 objects) are best saved in Amazon DynamoDB.

Offload your Architecture

• The more you offload the less infrastructure you need to maintain, scale and pay for.

• Offload popular traffic to Amazon CloudFront and S3

• Introduce Caching

Review / Further Optimize

Use the following tools to further assess:

• AWS Trusted Advisor (business support)

• CloudWatch

• Amazon EC2 Usage Reports