3 Easy Steps To Dramatic AWS Cost Savings

We all love using AWS for the breadth and depth of their cloud services. Combining these services with the ability to interact with virtually everything through their API’s, it has never been easier to deploy new services and applications.

Developers and infrastructure engineers often have a field day with their newfound productivity and flexibility. All until they receive a tap on the shoulder from their red-faced boss, telling them they have gone way over budget.

We’ve put together a handy list of some easy wins for quick AWS Cost Savings:

Also see 11 tips on how to make the most of your AWS EC2 pricing

1. Power cycle instances and auto scaling groups

Power cycling instances and auto scaling groups are some of the safest ways to save money in AWS. If you have development and staging environments, they usually not required 24/7. So, you should be able to switch them off when everybody packs up and goes home. Thus, your servers sleep when your team does.

The most practical way to achieve this is to tag your resources according to their role or environment and schedule them. Once tagged, run a scheduled job to turn off all at your dev and staging instances at night (eg. 8 pm). Next, schedule another job to fire them back up in the morning (eg. 7 am). In this way, your cloud resources are ready to use when the early birds come in.

With auto scaling groups, it is a similar process. Instead of turning your servers off, you set your minimum, maximum and desired instances to zero for the period you want to switch the servers off and then change it back when you want them to come back on.

2. Automatically terminate rogue, incorrectly tagged resources

The following is a great way to save money and ensure that your teammates tag resources correctly. Tagging is a key element of making your AWS account more manageable. It also makes it much easier to understand where your dollars are being spent.

To achieve this, just run a scheduled job that will terminate resources in your AWS account which are missing the tags that you have defined as required, for example ‘Name of Project’.

Puppet labs have released an open source Python library that you can use (if you don’t feel like writing up your own code) – py-awsaudit.

Another great open-source tool for increasing your tag quality and cost accountability is Auto Tag by GorillaStack. It automatically adds a tag for the user who created the resource! You can also check out our library of projects that you can leverage to accelerate your cloud automation.

3. Utilize spot pricing

Spot pricing can allow you to save up to 90% on some resources, yes that wasn’t a typo – 90%. Early on, many people were hesitant about using spot pricing because it was not well understood and difficult to utilize with many workloads. However, Amazon has been working hard to make spot pricing more accessible.

Now, you can use spot pricing when launching Elastic Map Reduce clusters, EC2 AutoScaling groups, Elastic Beanstalk and AWS CloudFormation to name a few. If you are a cost-conscious customer, it has never been easier. With the launch of the spot fleet API, spot pricing is really starting to become more accessible and will deliver amazing savings.

AWS Cost Savings – Save money on AWS

By implementing one or two of these strategies, you can stand to save a significant chunk from your bill and get your boss off your back about the budget.

If you need help getting a handle on your AWS bill today, without writing custom code and setting up jobs, GorillaStack can help. Book a live demo with us or learn how our Cost Optimization can help your business with these use cases: Schedule EC2 and Schedule Auto Scaling.

Out of the box, these tools give you intuitive scheduling, timezone support and the ability to snooze or cancel if you need to keep your servers or AutoScale groups alive when you’re working late.

You can also receive flexible AWS billing alerts about your cloud spend from chat apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams. So, you never get caught out spending more than you expect.

GorillaStack is here to help you optimize the use of your cloud resources and gain significant AWS Cost Savings. When your developers sleep, so does your cloud environment. We believe in giving users full control of cloud without coding and pay for what you use.

If you’re looking for alternatives on AWS pricing plans, take a read on AWS Savings Plans vs Reserved Instances.