In today’s corporate landscape, the amount of money that businesses and organizations spend on availing of cloud infrastructure and services is huge. Corporations have been migrating to the cloud, trying to quickly move their applications to it in order to gain higher workload scalability. One of the most popular cloud service providers has been AWS due to its vast circle of beneficial cloud computing offerings.
Although companies are able to reap major advantages from AWS services, many are seen becoming complacent after migrating their operations to the cloud, having to bear high costs due to poor management of the cloud. In this article, we will take a look at some highly beneficial techniques that allow organizations to manage their AWS Cloud spending in an efficient manner. But first, let us take a look at some of the challenges that hinder the efforts of businesses to manage their AWS cloud spending effectively.
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Challenges in Managing AWS Cloud Spending
From cloud computing power to database storage, AWS is a highly popular product that is being widely used today. Businesses have been shifting their web services as well as applications to the cloud in huge quantities. It is common for organizations to plan their AWS cloud spending pre-assign resources to ensure cloud optimization. But still, it is common for a number of companies to complain that their operational costs are higher than they want them to be. Here are a few reasons for high costs and unplanned cloud sprawl.
- Inelasticity
- Sub-optimal Architecture
- Forecasting Complexity
- Price variation based on region
- Underutilization of EC2 Instances
There are a number of tools, strategies, and resources out there developed by experienced and expert third-party vendors, like Cloud Computing Technologies, as well as AWS itself, to help IT teams discover the causes of inefficiencies within a company’s AWS cloud spending. Eliminating resources that are unused, reserved instances, and other such simple techniques are not usually able to fix the issue as the primary reason for AWS cloud spending inefficiencies is, more often than not, far more complex. The absence of tools for configuration and automated deployment, poor organization, and absent or unclear processes of development resulting in nonstandard deployments is what frequently cause unplanned costs to occur. It is not easy to keep AWS Cloud spending in check with complex dependency lines, unpredictable legacy applications, and highly distributed teams. Here are some expert techniques that the specialized teams working for Cloud Computing Technologies leverage in order to keep the AWS Cloud spending of their clients to a minimum.
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Trusted Advisor and Cloudcheckr
Setting up an interface where collected historical data of usage and cost can be easily viewed is the first important step in managing AWS Cloud spending. There are native AWS tools as well as third parties, including CCT, that offer not only consolidated monitoring but recommendations aimed at saving costs as well. This can be done by utilizing resources like parking calendars, scheduled runtime, and others to leverage on-demand instances’ best prices. Cloudcheckr is highly useful for enforcing standard policies as well as for identifying the launch of a resource outside the configuration and alerting developers in such a scenario. Furthermore, it also enables managers to gain full visibility of their environments by offering detailed billing analysis and cost heat maps.
Similarly, Trusted Advisor is another AWS native tool that makes recommendations for opportunities of saving costs. It also offers recommendations for fault tolerance, security, and availability. Even provisioned IOPS and CPU usage tunings can help a business save a significant amount. The Cost Explorer tool is another such resource that displays cost queries, such as daily spending, monthly cost by linked account, and monthly cost by service.
Reserved Instances
Purchasing EC2 instances, whether fully or partially paid upfront or non, or either for one year or three-year period, is the most obvious way businesses can keep their cloud computing costs in check. On reserved instances, users can benefit from up to 50% cost savings as compared to on-demand instances. The complications that come along with reserved instances can be reduced to a certain degree, and value can still be extracted from them by ensuring the various best practices for reserved instances out there.
Spot Instances
Users can set the maximum computing price on EC2 through the use of spot instances. This is highly useful to process data loads that are large in off-peak hours and run background tasks in a more cost-efficient manner. Setting up an Auto Scaling group consisting of only spot instances is recommended, though. If the price meets a bid, CloudWatch can scale up the group if it is inside the request parameters, as it watches the current rate. After that, you need to establish a second group for Auto Scaling that has only on-demand instances and set an ELB in between both the groups. This will serve the requests by either one of the two groups. If the bid price is lower than the on-demand price, you need to set the min_size of the first spot-instance group to 0 by creating a new launch configuration.
Automate and Organize
Without organized processes and automation, decentralized teams are likely to produce storage volumes, configurations, and security rules that are nonstandard and convoluted, resulting in a higher AWS Cloud spending. CloudFormation is the answer to most of these issues and concerns. An organization that deploys on AWS without CloudFormation cannot extract the maximum potential of AWS services and remains prone to risks pertaining to both cost and security as nonstandard code is deployed by multiple developers that are never updated and usually forgotten about.
Conclusion of Expert Techniques to Manage AWS Cloud Spending
Through resource optimization and following the above-mentioned strategies, businesses can easily and efficiently manage their AWS Cloud spending. Trusting your AWS cloud to Cloud Computing Technologies means constant evaluation of cost-effectiveness, right-sizing your infrastructure through frequent engineering reviews, and implementation of best practices of DevOps automation. Contact us for solutions and services related to Expert Techniques to Manage AWS Cloud Spending.
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