Manage AWS Costs: Guide to Controlling and Reducing AWS Expenses

Garry Forsyth (Chief Technology Officer) 17-Jun-2023 09:34:00

AWS Cost Management

In this article, we will provide a high-level guide to help you to start to manage and reduce your AWS costs effectively.

These are the top areas where we see a missed opportunity by teams, who could remove significant cost and complexity from their AWS environments.

Analyse and Optimise Your Resource Usage

The first step in allowing you to manage AWS costs is understanding your resource utilisation. AWS provides detailed usage reports and monitoring tools that allow you to identify underutilized resources. By analysing this data, you can identify areas where you can scale down or eliminate unnecessary services, resulting in immediate cost savings.

Utilise AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer is a powerful tool that provides visual representations of your costs and usage patterns. It allows you to analyze historical data, create custom reports, and forecast future expenses. By leveraging this tool, you can gain insights into your spending patterns, identify cost drivers, and make informed decisions to optimise your AWS costs.

Implement Cost Alerts and Budgets

AWS provides cost management tools, including AWS Budgets and Amazon CloudWatch Alarms, that enable you to set up cost alerts and notifications. By defining spending thresholds and receiving timely alerts, you can proactively monitor your costs and take necessary actions to stay within budget.

Implement Cost Allocation Tags

Cost allocation tags help you organize and categorize your AWS resources, enabling you to track costs at a granular level. By assigning appropriate tags to your resources, you can gain a better understanding of which departments or projects are driving costs. This allows you to allocate resources more efficiently and optimize spending based on business priorities.

Implement Auto Scaling and Right-Sizing

Auto Scaling enables you to automatically adjust your AWS resources based on demand. By dynamically scaling up or down, you can avoid overprovisioning and ensure optimal resource utilization. Additionally, regularly right-sizing your instances based on actual usage can help eliminate wastage and reduce costs significantly.

Take Advantage of AWS Discounts

Take advantage of AWS discounts by leveraging both AWS Spot Instances and AWS Reserved Instances. AWS Spot Instances allow you to bid on spare Amazon EC2 capacity, providing significant cost savings compared to On-Demand or Reserved Instances.

While Spot Instances are ideal for fault-tolerant and time-flexible workloads, Reserved Instances offer substantial savings by committing to a one- or three-year term. By strategically combining the use of Spot Instances for flexible workloads and Reserved Instances for predictable workloads, you can optimize your AWS costs and maximize your savings.

Managing AWS costs: Where do I go from here?

Effectively managing AWS costs requires a proactive approach and continuous monitoring. While following the strategies outlined in this guide can help you gain better control over your expenses, there are comprehensive cloud management platforms available that can simplify the process even further.

One such platform is CloudOps, a plug-and-play solution specifically designed for AWS. CloudOps offers a wide range of features that cover all aspects of cost management, including resource usage analysis, cost optimization, and monitoring. It provides built-in cost auditing and reporting capabilities, allowing you to track and analyze your AWS expenses with ease.

Moreover, CloudOps offers access to AWS experts when you need them. With their expertise, you can gain valuable insights, receive personalized recommendations, and ensure that you are making the most cost-effective decisions for your cloud infrastructure.

By leveraging CloudOps, you can streamline your AWS cost management efforts and achieve optimal cost efficiency. The platform's comprehensive features, cost auditing capabilities, and access to AWS experts provide a holistic solution to help you stay within budget while maximizing the value of your cloud investment.

Remember, as your AWS usage evolves, it is essential to continuously evaluate and adjust your cost management strategies. Whether you choose to follow the manual approach outlined in this guide or utilise a comprehensive cloud management platform like CloudOps, the key is to remain proactive and attentive to your AWS costs, ensuring that your cloud infrastructure remains optimised and cost-efficient.

Take a free test drive of CloudOps and see what it could save you.

Or speak to a member of our UK-based AWS support team about your cloud challenges.