Services
Platform and Technology Capabilities
Home / Insights / Blog / Right-Costing Your AWS Environment
July 11, 2017 - by Synoptek
Whether you are budgeting a move to the cloud or already using Amazon Web Services (AWS), optimizing your company’s pricing based on utilization is a tricky endeavor. Many organizations never anticipate their costs rising and unaware of how to stop the leak.
The AWS pricing structure has flummoxed many organizations, with CFOs wondering how they ended up with an unforeseen bill for cloud services. A VentureBeat article states, “AWS best supports the execution of variable workloads, yet it can be economical for certain consistent workloads as well. It can be a difficult task to estimate which consistent and variable workloads are good candidates to move from on-premise or private clouds to the public cloud. The good news is that AWS offers enterprise-friendly services… which allow for offloading consistent usage within AWS to longer-term contracts in return for lowing pricing.” Making that determination is an ongoing job and many Mid-size organizations struggle at this. The AWS pricing structure is so complex, they provides a guide to help organizations avoid unexpected charges.
AWS will add an overage charge if your utilization goes above your service tier. As such, ensuring you have right-sized your environment is very important for budgetary considerations. With a knowledgeable and experienced managed AWS Managed Services Provider (MSP), you can realize cost savings and performance optimization. The right service provider can help you optimize your AWS environment’s performance through right-sizing recommendations, resource management, and advanced alerting and cloud governance. An MSP can help you understand your current consumption and if you have idle resources that you can reduce.
AWS has implemented various types of “Instances.” Two of these, are Reserved and Spot Instances. Reserved Instances involve a discount for a long-term commitment. It is a billing discount that is applied and offered across different billing periods, likely shorter billing terms but a commitment of several years. Reserved Instances do not have an automatic renewal built-in, so you must actively choose to continue along with the plan if wanted. On the other hand, Spot Instances enable you to bid on unused EC2 instances, allowing for lowering your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) costs. A Spot Instance involves hourly rates and fluctuates based on the supply and demand across AWS. Ultimately, with proper configuration of Spot Instances, they can be used for production purposes. Knowing which Instance is right for your company can be tricky, Synoptek can help guide you in the right direction.
Case Study
Blog