Since its inception, AWS (Amazon Web Services) has been a go-to service for hosting and data storage in particular. However, Amazon isn’t just dominating only in these two areas. The enterprise has diversified into a variety of industries, including cloud computing, and now controls the majority of the worldwide cloud industry. The worldwide market for AWS Managed Services was at US$775 million in 2020. According to a CSA estimate, AWS has 41.5 percent of the cloud computing industry, which is more than all of its competitors combined: Microsoft Azure (29.4%), Google Cloud (3.0%), and IBM Cloud (3.0%). (2.6 percent). Amazon Web Services signed a $600 million agreement with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 2013 to serve their cloud computing needs, which is one of the lesser-known AWS facts.
Most Fortune 500 companies use the APN (AWS Partner Network) and over 90% of Fortune 100 companies to build services and solutions for their cents. In addition, it is used by some of the world’s most well-known businesses, like Facebook, Netflix, Adobe, and the BBC, to power their most important initiatives. With the ever-growing number of AWS cloud users, it became imperative for companies like E-Connect to provide cost-effective AWS Managed Services to help in the automation of cloud management tasks and continuously manage customers’ AWS infrastructure.
Need For A Cost Effective AWS Instance And What You Can Do If your company uses the Amazon cloud, you may be aware that it is full of resources waiting to be provisioned to help you meet the real-time demands of your applications. However, the costs of accessing those resources can quickly add up, especially if you’re not careful. Amazon EC2 fees are most likely a significant portion of your cloud payment. Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances are virtual computers used to execute Amazon Web Services applications (AWS). Cloud users typically begin investigating solutions when they realize that in their eagerness to adopt the cloud, they have deployed more instances on Amazon’s EC2 or other AWS services other than those healthy for their budget and have left them running when they are not being used. It is hard to plan for future projects and capacity requirements until you take control of your AWS cost. Here are a few solutions that E-Connect offer for you to implement:
- Rightsizing and choosing the Right Instances – Making sure you’re utilizing the proper size of EC2 instances for your application’s use case is an important element of lowering your AWS costs. EC2 instances come in various types and sizes. So you want to optimize your instances depending on the key use case of your application. The principal purpose or workload of your application should indicate whether you should focus on CPU- or memory-intensive instance types. Some general-purpose instances that help in cost and performance optimization fall under three instance series viz. A1, M4, M5, M6, T2, T3, T4. In our upcoming blog, we will come up with details of these instance types, their purpose, and prices that will help determine the best instance for your AWS setup.
- Move to Reserved Instance for EC2, RDS for productions – Reserved Instances aren’t the greatest choice for non-production settings like development, testing, QA, and training. These settings are less predictable; you may not know how many instances you’ll need or when you’ll need them, so it’s best to avoid wasting money on these fees. Moreover, there are no roll-over minutes, i.e., if you don’t use the reserved instances in a given month, you won’t get extra time in the next month. E-Connect’s Cloud experts recommend the best practices to fully optimize your non-production instances without committing to an AWS EC2 RI term that will go underutilized. Using automated platforms, we help identify and eliminate wasted cloud spending.
- Unattached EBS Volumes Should Be Deleted – When you start an EC2 instance, an EBS volume is associated with it to serve as local block storage. When you end an EC2 instance, the EBS volume is erased only if you ticked the “delete on termination” option when you launched the instance. If the box is not ticked, the EBS volume remains and contributes to the monthly AWS fee. Therefore, even if your company is new to the AWS Cloud, double-check the EBS volumes. When you start an EC2 instance, an EBS volume is associated with it to serve as local block storage. When you end an EC2 instance, the EBS volume is erased only if you ticked the “delete on termination” option when you launched the instance. If the box is not ticked, the EBS volume remains and contributes to the monthly AWS fee. Therefore, even if your company is new to the AWS Cloud, double-check the EBS volumes.
- Upgrading Instances to the Most Recent Generation – Because of the breadth of Amazon Web Services’ products and services, there are regular announcements regarding how products have been changed or capabilities added to support specific services. When Amazon Web Services introduces a new generation of instances, they often outperform their predecessors in performance and functionality. It implies that you may either upgrade current instances to the most recent generation or shrink existing instances with questionable utilization metrics to get the same level of performance at a lower cost.
- Get Rid of Zombie Assets – The phrase “zombie assets” refers to any underutilized asset that contributes to the cost of running on the AWS Cloud. This category contains ‘assets for instance’ components that were triggered when an instance failed to begin and unused Elastic Load Balancers. AWS offers CloudHealth as a solution because it gives enterprises complete visibility into their cloud infrastructures.
- Delete Old and Unused Snapshots – It’s easy to forget that previously-stored snapshots are still on S3 and continue to pay monthly expenses. These expenses may be more significant than you believe. Although most backups are incremental, the initial snapshot captures the complete drive. Furthermore, incremental snapshots may use more storage space than the initial complete image over a long retention time. It can result in significant savings in storage expenses over time.
- Move Object Data to Lower-cost Tiers – You must analyze storage access patterns on the object data set for 30 days or longer using S3 Analytics. It gives tips on how to save money by using S3 Infrequently Accessed (S3 IA). Using Life Cycle Pocies, you can automate moving these objects into a lower-cost storage tier. Alternatively, you can also use S3 Intelligent-Tiering, which automatically analyzes and moves your objects to the appropriate storage tier.
- Delete Disassociated Elastic IP Addresses – Because you might be charged for Elastic IP charges even if you’re not using them, it’s vital to understand Elastic IPs and Elastic IP pricing on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Keeping Elastic IP expenses under control is a straightforward two-step procedure using CloudHealth.
- Schedule (Start & Stop) the Instances – AWS has introduced an “Instance Scheduler” tool, along with a detailed configuration guide. To plan the stopping and starting of your instances, you may use the AWS Instance Scheduler and an automated AWS CloudFormation template.
- Enable AWS Monitoring Tools – Using monitoring solutions such as AWS CloudTrail, AWS CloudWatch, AWS Certificate Manager, and Amazon EC2 Dashboard, you can keep track of all activity in your AWS resources. E-Connect’s AWS Managed Services is an effective means of addressing your AWS cloud requirements with best practices to keep costs lower. However, it’s essential to understand that you’ll be able to reduce costs only so far. Once you’ve rightsized your infrastructure and taken advantage of the appropriate cloud services for your use, you’ll have a cloud environment that wrings the most value out of every dollar. You may request a free consultation on your AWS setup by clicking here or visiting our website.
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