AWS Cost Optimization Checklist

Are you sure you’re following all of the practices and strategies to optimize your expenses? AWS has many flexible methods of keeping your expenditure to a minimum but the myriad of services and strategies could overwhelm you. Check out the list of essential strategies below to see if you’ve got all your bases covered.

Instances

• Purchase instances that suit your organizational needs.
• Buy reserved instances with appropriate duration. Don’t reserve instances long-term if you won’t need them.
• Analyze the pricing history of the Spot market at least a week before purchase to know which instances are worth purchasing.
• Purchase Spot Instances for resources that aren’t set up for production.
• Deploy some Spot instance tools so you don’t have to worry about your instances being interrupted.
• Monitor your instances monthly. Purchase the latest instances.

Scheduling

• Schedule your instances. Keep them running only on business hours.
• Make use of AWS instance scheduler or third-party automatic scheduling tools to take the task off your hands.
• Try to be even more thorough with the scheduling times. If you don’t need instances to be running during certain working hours(like lunchtime), then turn it off.
• Schedule your resources based on their activity. Don’t need to keep them running if they are idle.
• Shut down resources other than instances like unused DB volumes or elastic IPs based on time or activity.

Storage

• Optimizing your storage directly results in the optimization of your costs.
• Store your running resources on S3 and move them between tiers according to their activity.
• Set up a lifecycle policy
• Use S3 Intelligent-tiering for moving between frequent and infrequent access tiers automatically.
• Archive your less active resources on Glacier.
• Archive data backups long-term on Glacier Deep Archive.
• Backup large volumes of data on Elastic Block Storage. Store your EC2 instances or clusters on here.
• Applications with high workloads can be run on Amazon EFS as it provides auto-scaling and quick outputs.
• Delete old snapshots and unallocated disk volumes
• Delete unnecessary objects and buckets
• Make use of AWS auto-scaling to allocate the sufficient capacity of storage to the workload
• Choose open-source operating systems

AWS Cost Management Tools

• Analyze your expenses with Cost and Usage report.
• Use Trusted Advisor to see your expense forecast.
• Figure out unused resources with Trusted Advisor
• Keep up with the trends in the market with AWS Cost Explorer
• Create budget plans for your resources
• Aggregate the expenses by services you run
• Arm the individual employees of your organization with cost optimization tools