How to Reduce AWS Costs: Detailed Overview

As a comprehensive cloud computing platform for businesses, Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers an assortment of services for managing their data infrastructures as they grow and expand. As a result of its breadth of services, you have several options to optimize your costs by using an elastic approach. 

Some users, however, find it difficult to control their expenditures due to a variety of causes. AWS operational costs can seem daunting when you are trying to understand how to reduce them. Workload, instances, performance, and expenditures have to be constantly monitored, analyzed, and tracked. You will learn tips to help you reduce AWS costs in this article. 

Using AWS, companies can reduce AWS bills, boost performance, and manage capacity effectively. Through the various pricing and billing models, users can improve their economic structure. While AWS is widely used, optimizing costs can be difficult for many organizations. That’s what AWS consulting services are for.

The article aims to look at the process of planning and making decisions about AWS costs. You must understand how the pricing models work to reduce your AWS costs.

AWS Price Reduction: When to Consider It

It is estimated that $14.1 billion has been wasted in 2019 on unnecessary AWS expenses. AWS cost optimization is important when your bill grows 2–3 times higher than anticipated – especially if you are working with a strict budget.

Find out if your current expenses have increased by analyzing your current costs with an AWS Cost Management tool. Wouldn’t it be nice to save money and put that money towards promoting or improving your business? Getting a feel for the AWS pricing system might appear complex, so keep reading to grasp the basics and start on the path to a more affordable AWS bill.

10 Tips to Reduce Your AWS Costs

Discover the costs of the AWS services you consume before undertaking any actions to reduce costs. Customers can try AWS services free of charge up to specified limits for each service under the AWS Free Tier. Here is how to find out if you are over the free tier limit.

Then you can view and analyze your AWS costs and usage utilizing AWS Cost Explorer. You can use this tool to visually monitor cost and usage at a high level (e.g. AWS accounts, AWS services), or on a resource-by-resource basis (e.g. EC2 instance ID). Use the “Monthly costs by linked account report” to identify the top accounts where you incur costs. Determine which services contribute most to costs within each of those accounts. Using the “Monthly costs by service report” will allow you to do this. Filter and identify the top resources incurring costs using the hourly and resource level granularity.

After reviewing your AWS usage and costs, you should have a good idea of what they are. Here are 10 tactical ways to reduce AWS costs using existing AWS tools.

Moreover, consider reviewing AWS Security Consulting Services.

1. Shut down any unused EC2 instances you have

First, let’s look at how to reduce AWS costs. Even if you stop an instance, but do not terminate it, your EBS costs will still be incurred, since the volume is still stored. When you terminate EC2 instances, you will also terminate EC2 and EBS expenses.  The same applies to other instance types, e.g., Elastic Cache.

2. Minimize oversized instances and volumes

Making these decisions requires an analysis of your metrics. Data from the short-term should not be relied upon. A month of data should be sufficient, however, please make sure you also check for seasonal peaks. Another important point to note is that EBS volumes cannot be reduced. Therefore, it will be necessary to create a new volume of the appropriate size and copy the data from the old one.

3. Use private IPs

Even if your instances are in the same availability zone, when you use a public IP inside of the AWS EC2 network, you’ll be charged Intra-Regional Data Transfer fees. You will have the same problem if you use Elastic IP addresses or Elastic Load Balancers.

4. Take a snapshot and delete low-used Amazon EBS volumes

During seven days, EBS volumes that have very low activity (less than 1 IOPS per day) indicate that they are inactive. Use the Trusted Advisor Underutilized Amazon EBS Volumes Check to identify these volumes. Delete the volumes after taking a snapshot of them (in case you require them later). With Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager, snapshots can be automatically created.