Cost Savings on AWS

This post is mainly focused around cost savings on AWS. Some of the projects I have been in, the expenses on the services were huge.

Many of the services were over provisioned and under utilised. So this article aims to focus on techniques that could potentially save your company thousands.

1. Compute Optimiser

Compute Optimiser profiles the EC2 metrics and suggests changes to the type of EC2 to save costs. For example you may have provisioned a m4.xlarge while you only need m5.large which is a lot cheaper. Or you may have provisioned a compute optimised EC2 while you need a memory optimised one which will work out a bit cheaper and give better performance.

Use compute optimiser to right-size your instances and that can significantly save you money.

2. Savings Plan

AWS recently added savings plan service where you can actually buy compute across the type of machines. Traditionally businesses used to buy Reserved Instances. The disadvantage is you are locked with a type of EC2 which may change within the RI contract period.

Savings Plan gives you more flexibility and allows you to better optimise resources and eventually could lead to significant savings.

3. Dynamo DB