AWS Cost Optimisation
Cost Optimisation is one of the pillars of AWS Well Architected Framework and is directly connected to FinOps concepts.
Cost optimisation has 5 pillars:
- Practice Cloud Financial Management - Understanding all 6 pieces of cloud financial management
- Expenditure and usage awareness - Understanding governance, monitoring, cost and usage, and decommissioning resources
- Cost-effective Resources - Selecting the correct resources and services as well as data transfer preparation
- Managing demand and supplying resources - keeping up with demand and ensuring your resources are dynamic
- Optimize over time - Maintaining optimisation as time progresses
Practice Cloud Financial Management
Understand your use case
What kind of encryption your data need? - No encryption, At rest, on transit, both.
Does your data need to be separated? - yes, no
Can the data enter the public internet? - yes, no
What are the CPU, memory and storage requirements?
How often will resources be accessed?
Processes - Trading, Report and notify, Monitor
Culture - Prizes, gamification
Keeping updated - AWS News blog, AWS What's New, AWS this Week (a cloud guru)
Budgeting and Reporting costs in AWS
Cost and Usage Report (CUR)
It is a report that can create a report with specific cost information such as pricing, discount, credits, fees, taxes and so on. The report can be exposed as xml or csv and you can use Athena, Redshift or QuickSights to analyse it.
Application Cost Profiler
This service can track tenant usage and export its associated costs. To do that you need to configure application to be metered as a tenant application, this will send its usage to Application Cost Profiler , this data will be collected, processed and can be used to generate reports.
AWS Budgets
Allows you to create budgets and cost alerts, once they pass the threshold defined they can send notifications (email, sns) or trigger actions such as pausing services. Its granularity can be set to annual, quarterly, monthly or daily.
Expenditure and Usage Awareness
AWS Organizations
Organizations are a way to use multiple accounts to have better management, limit resources, improve security and restrict access. They can be used, for example, to have one organization per environment or per team.
Not only it helps with the technical part, but it also can help you to track and limit costs across those accounts and have it all in one consolidated report.
AWS Control Tower
Automate a landing zone (multi account AWS environment) using a set of guardrails that you can specify. The guardrails can be preventative, detective, mandatory or optional.