Recession-Proof Your AWS Cloud

Published in

Serverless Guru

3 min readAug 21, 2019

Save thousands if not millions of dollars now by exhausting all the built-in cost savings tools AWS provides.

Chances are, you can reduce your AWS costs by, let’s say, 10 to 50%. For some companies, that could result in millions of dollars of costs savings every year. Because of Amazon’s economies of scale philosophy, they give you lots of tools to help you save money. Here are a few quick tips on where to start.

Trusted Advisor

AWS Trust Advisor has a Cost Optimization view. Ironically, you need to pay more to save more, that is, this view is only available with a paid support plan. However, if you’re running an expensive AWS workload, chances are you already are taking advantage of one of the support plans.

Even if you don’t have a support plan yet, the cost optimization recommendations of Trusted Advisor are so detailed and intelligent, that it may be worth the support plan.

As you can see in the screenshot below, the Cost Optimization view of Trusted Advisor gives you plain English comments like this:

“12 of 15 Amazon EC2 instances have low average daily utilization. Monthly savings of up to $739.25 might be available by minimizing underutilized instances.”

Once you do have support, you get this detailed breakdown.

Now imagine if this is for 1200 out of 1500 servers…

Instance Scheduler

Do all of your development, test, and staging servers need to run all the time?
Are those environments currently running all the time?

Save boatloads of money by deploying the AWS-maintained Instance Scheduler CloudFormation Stack!

Here’s a video on how easy that is to set up:

EC2 Resource Optimization Recommendations

Inside the AWS Cost Explorer, choose the Recommendations tab, which was announced just a few weeks ago, right in time for this week’s economic downturn.

A screenshot of the recommendations tab of the AWS Cost Explorer — Recommendations inside the Cost Explorer

Consultants

AWS makes it easy to save costs, but hiring experts may speed up the process and make it safer and smoother. Ask your AWS Consulting Partner if they would be willing to make these optimizations based on performance.

Ask your local AWS expert if they’ll accept performance-based compensation on cost optimizations.

Here at Serverless Guru, an AWS Consulting Partner and a Serverless.com partner, we have experience saving customers hundreds of thousands of dollars a year through optimizations like the one above, helping companies remotely and on-site.

Serverless

Identify workloads that only need to run sporadically and move them to Lambda. You’d probably get a 100% cost reduction in many cases since you get one million free invocations of Lambda and API Gateway per month.