Suspense was in the air as we tuned into the live stream of AWS re:Invent’s keynote speech. With all of the continuous changes and updates, which news would AWS give us today? Andy Jassy took the stage and within an hour we had heard about the launch of new generations of instances, advances in artificial intelligence, increased performance in database services, and simplified migration for large amounts of data.
The room came alive with excitement, conversation about new ideas between our developers, architects, and technical support team members arose. They were already thinking of how to implement these new features. I was sitting in the corner quietly thinking – “What will this mean in terms of costs?”
How often do you ask yourself this question?
The management of costs on AWS is a challenging one for companies of all sizes. Although AWS offers great services that help significantly reduce costs in comparison to on-premise or colocation data centers, it is easy to quickly increase usage leading to a rise in spend.
However, with the launch of all these great new features and technologies on AWS – who can resist?
At AllCloud, we not only specialize in the designing, deploying and operating cloud environments, but in cost management as well. From our experience with companies of all sizes and industries, we have been able to develop a set of best practices that tackle costs and recognize opportunities for optimization on a case by case basis.
So, where do you start? Visibility is key. It is crucial to fully understand all aspects of your environment, your usage of services and your cost trends. Has your usage increased? Why? What actions can you take? You can’t tackle costs if you do not understand where they come from.
Getting the answers to those questions can be difficult and may take time. However, once the information has been gathered, the results will be fruitful. You may even find that you are paying for unused resources.
You are now ready to take action! Believe it or not, there are ways to optimize nearly every AWS service. Not all recommendations will be applicable to your environment, but in my experience, you will be able to reduce costs in at least one area.
Popular options are purchasing reservations, downsizing instances, and if possible, switching your instances to newer generations which often have better performance and are cheaper. We have customers who have saved 25% on their monthly bill by purchasing reserved instances. AWS will even surprise you once in awhile by reducing costs for specific services – for example, S3 pricing will be reduced in December 2016!
Great optimization, however, is achieved by digging into each service and exploring all the options to reduce costs.
You may be wondering – who actually has the time to do this?
The technical teams usually need to focus on development and feature enhancement, the finance departments cannot focus only on AWS optimization, and most companies do not have an employee dedicated to the management of AWS costs.
Because of this, AllCloud has a dedicated team to help you manage and tackle your AWS costs.
Your challenge, becomes our challenge!
We will take the time to analyze your environment and costs in depth, help you understand and manage them, and find ways to optimize. Our goal is to teach you the tricks to continuously reduce unwanted costs.
If you have reached the end of this blog, you will find that I have left the best for last. We can actually help you save costs from day one. Not only do we offer immediate discounts on your AWS Business Support Plan, but if you are currently using Developer Support, you can upgrade to Business Support for FREE!
We are ready to help you tackle your AWS costs – are you?