How to Keep Your Amazon AWS Pricing Within Budget with Full Visibility of Cloud Costs

One of the key benefits of migrating your IT infrastructure to the cloud is that it’s completely scalable and flexible.

But many organisations fail to realise that same flexibility will often cause your cloud costs to rise well over your allocated budget. And, when you receive your monthly cloud bills in arrears, this will happen without the approval, or the knowledge, of the person responsible for managing that budget.

Furthermore, if your cloud environment isn’t configured appropriately, you’ll probably be over-spending further. You may even be paying for expenses that aren’t necessary to your business at all.

So, how can you solve these challenges with Amazon AWS pricing?

You could try to use:

• Options from your cloud provider, such as manual management of your bills or in-built cost management tools
• Cost management tools from third-party vendors
• An AWS cloud consultant.

In addition to those options, there are some steps you could take yourself which could help ease your Amazon AWS pricing problems:

• Review your architecture to ensure it’s still fit for purpose
• Scale your usage of resources out of core hours
• Remove old licenses or resources no longer required
• Consider implementing auto-scaling for your cloud
• Find out whether a different data centre could save you money (for instance, UK-based data centres can achieve cost savings of up to 30%)
• Work with a provider who passes on savings.

While these may help, you’ll have to invest even more time and money to pursue them. More importantly, though, they won’t solve the root problem.

Unless you’re able to constantly monitor and optimise your ever-changing cloud infrastructure, your monthly costs will inevitably be higher than you’ve budgeted for.

Seeing your AWS spend rise unexpectedly is a challenge you’ll continue to face, unless you can put automated cost optimisation tools in place to match the fluid nature of the cloud.

We’ve seen many organisations reach this realisation when its already too late, with costs already spiralling out of control. It’s crucial that you take proactive action to prevent this from harming your own business.

To learn more about how to gain full visibility and control of your Azure pricing and costs, read our in-depth article which explores this topic further.