While getting onto the cloud has never been easier and more cost-effective, without proper management, these very costs can quickly spiral out of control with the pay-as-you-go pricing model. Let us look at a few methods to govern and optimize cloud deployments and optimize your EC2 Costs.
It is pertinent to note that the leading cloud providers continue to lower unit costs, and also provide cost-control tools and services. The users need to be aware of the tools at their disposal to be able to optimize, based on their unique requirements.
How can you optimize your EC2 costs?
Let us start at the very beginning. Good planning starts before deployment. If you are able to identify and segregate based on the below parameters, then the cloud model delivers value right out of the gate:
- Purpose (Development, Production etc),
- Growth Expectations ( steady, dynamic growth etc )
- Longevity ( short-term vs long-term application)
Options such as pay-as-you-go, multiple-year reserved instances, with flexible payment options, spot instances etc are some models for managing costs. However, barring businesses that are technology-driven (e-commerce for example), most enterprises opt for a steady-state model in their gradual shift to their cloud. It is important for them to find the best methods to leverage the cost.
In deployment mode, the key to cost control is to benchmark, monitor and correct. Where most customers tend to suffer is in the monitor phase. While many rely on their Managed service providers to flag large anomalies or rapid burst scenarios, even this is effective only towards the end of the month. Especially painful are cases where unintended or compromised systems generate outbound internet traffic to incur huge costs.
Resource Optimization Feature launched by AWS
AWS, one of the world’s largest IaaS providers, has recently launched a new feature called ‘EC2 Resource Optimization Recommendations’ to help customers optimize their cloud instance or EC2 costs. As the name clearly suggests, this tool generates custom Amazon EC2 resource optimization recommendations based on your past usage. This tool helps by identifying a number of optimization opportunities, estimated monthly savings, and relative savings overall. This feature is available to all AWS customers as a part of the AWS Cost Management Suite. Using these recommendations will help your team to easily identify and act on opportunities for improving cost efficiency.
Cloud Kinetics’ Arcus Cloud Management platform helps our customers and our managed services team to continuously benchmark (set thresholds), audit and flag anomalies right away, so information reaches the key persons right away. Cost auditing, soft limits, policy-violation-reports and real-time reporting are key elements in our journey towards complete optimization.
Working with Cloud Kinetics
Most enterprises have many traditional applications running on-premise. There may be reasons due to which you wish to move some of them to the cloud. However, this decision needs careful analysis of your applications and your business. Cloud Kinetics can help in optimizing your EC2 Costs and accelerate your cloud adoption by leveraging the power and flexibility of cloud to achieve meaningful business results.
