CloudOps blog (AWS & Azure)

AWS Cloud Expert Shares Insight on How to Reduce Costs & Increase Efficiency

Written by Steve Rastall (Founder & CEO) | 13-Oct-2022 13:34:00
AWS may have to increase prices in late 2022/23 due to energy costs rising (Read more about the headwinds for the cloud in 2022 / 2023), I'll share three ways your business can save money on AWS.
  • First is to use AMEX and Auto bill pay so that you're never caught off guard by an unexpected charge and get terms and a discount!
  • Second - The Spot marketplace on AWS can save money and can catch out the non-expert.
  • And finally, don't forget reserved instances, the term used for discounted compute if you make a long-term commitment.
  • Bonus idea - Automation to keep costs down and managed overheads ongoing.

AWS provides you with complete control of your resources and lets you run on their proven environment for high availability, scalability in terms of capacity (with minimal friction), and low price per hour/month which is attractive to both enterprises as well start-ups because it’s easy peasy! It's also easy to spend, spend, spend!

Cashback for AWS from AMEX and Auto bill

The Platinum card is perfect for customers who want to earn 1% cash back on their AWS spending. There's no limit, and you'll automatically get paid in full each month after redeeming enough points! You also have payment terms up to, 56 days to strengthen cash flow. Auto bill is a function in AWS that alerts you if costs rise over a certain amount and it has to be configured; it is not active as default.

Spot Instances are also a cost-effective way to use Amazon EC2 when you can be flexible about when your application runs. Spot Instances allow you to bid on unused Amazon EC2 instances and run your applications on them at up to 90% off the On-Demand price, 50% is very typical. Spot Instances are available for use with all EC2 instance types, although the market evolves in regards to the availability of resource types.

Use of the Spot market is a great way to get cheap computing power but there are certain risks involved that you need to ensure don’t exceed your understanding or expertise. When using spot instances, please keep in mind that due to interruptions from Amazon EC2's monitoring system, these applications may fail or become unavailable at any moment. To help protect against this risk we recommend enabling CloudOps with Auto Scaling, so it takes action when needed such as launching replacement spots from another zone if possible.

 

Many AWS experts paint a picture that reserved instances are the answer.

One way to save money on your cloud computing costs is by purchasing reserved instances. These provide a significant discount (up to 75%, but typically 20% to 30%) compared with On-Demand pricing and can come with additional benefits such as capacity reservations, for instance, weighting for regional resource allocation. When you make this purchase, they are essentially making you commit yourself to use those particular servers within a certain period either 1 or 3 years at which point they will automatically convert back into regular prices.

 

Last Point automate cost management ongoing

Use AWS certified CloudOps to manage costs through its algorithm and autoscaling machine learning.  Spot is cheapest by far if the outage issue is acceptable or mitigated. AMEX's idea is just easy money. Reserved instances are better than nothing if you have stable applications and demands. CloudOps trial to get costs down and stable in the P&L.