Business Enterprise

Managing your spending in AWS

Zen Feb 9 2023

If yours is like many businesses, you might have entered 2023 determined to get better control over your budgets. Thankfully, when it comes to AWS, there's plenty you can do in terms of cost optimisation.

In our experience of providing AWS services to businesses across a range of industries, we’ve found that the following themes tend to continually crop up. Does your business face challenges in any of these areas?

Resourcing

Often, the organisations we deal with tend to be over generous with their cloud resources. And the best advice? Only run the resources you need.

From overspeccing to leaving resources running unnecessarily, it’s easy to save costs in AWS by keeping a close eye on what you need and when.

Easy fixes include turning off running resources when they’re not being used (think outside of working hours for example) and reserving instances (which can save significant amounts against on-demand pricing).

Rightsizing

Applying the lowest cost resources that still meet the demands of your workload seems like common sense, but it isn’t usually achieved at day one when businesses are still learning what works best for them.

Thinking of rightsizing as an iterative process reveals the importance of continual monitoring and review, of cost benefit analyses and regularly revisiting your solution to question its efficacy.

Making the right choices

Choosing the right service for the use case is key to decision-making in AWS. There are lots of options to choose from, and the choices keep changing! So, the 'right' choice six months ago may no longer be valid for your business.

And to compound this difficulty even more, making the right choices also includes your commitment strategy. Often, different services will have different purchasing options which can make them cheaper for long term commitments, but maybe not for your unique requirements.

Thankfully, we can help businesses to navigate both of these hurdles and make the right choices for them.

Monitoring

The best way to achieve ongoing success in all the above areas is through effective monitoring.

Knowing when to turn resources on or off, what features you need when or what type of instances you need is key to cost optimisation in the cloud. And that knowledge comes from having access to the right information at the right time. Thankfully, as well as the AWS Well-Architected Review, we offer a range of tools and services to help make this process easier.