Consequently, each snapshot contains all of the information needed to restore your data (from the moment when the snapshot was taken) to a new EBS volume. Snapshots are an efficient way to back up data on an EBS volume to an S3 storage bucket because they only back up data that’s changed since the last snapshot to prevent duplications in the S3 bucket. Therefore, rather than suggest that purchasing Reserved Instances is one of the best practices for AWS cost optimization, we’re going to recommend the effective management of Reserved Instances as an AWS cost optimization best practice-effective management consisting of weighing up all the variables before making a purchase and then monitoring utilization throughout the reservation’s lifecycle. It can also be an easy way to increase AWS costs if you don’t utilize the Reserved Instance as much as you expected to, purchase the wrong type of Reserved Instance, or purchase a “standard” Reserved Instance only to find AWS prices fall over the term of your reservation by more than the reservation “saves”. Purchasing Reserved Instances is an easy way to reduce AWS costs. Purchasing Reserved Instances and Savings Plans It’s worth pointing out that while instances are scheduled to be off, you’re still being charged for EBS volumes and other components attached to them.
You can apply more aggressive schedules by analyzing utilization metrics to determine when the instances are most frequently used, or apply an always stopped schedule which can be interrupted when access to the instances is required. However, it’s possible to save a lot more-especially if development teams work in irregular patterns or at irregular hours. It’s worth scheduling on/off times for non-production instances such as those used for developing, staging, testing, and QA, as you will save around 65% of running these instances if you apply an “on” schedule of 8.00 a.m. It’s still worth analyzing utilization metrics to find opportunities to move workloads to different families (other than “General Purpose”) that better suit their needs. Therefore, rightsizing is only a worthwhile best practice if there are instances whose peak utilization does not exceed ~45%. If you double the capacity when you go up one size, then you also half the capacity when you go down one size. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work like that because of the way in which instances double in capacity for each increase in size.
The purpose of rightsizing is to match instance sizes to their workloads. Rightsizing EC2 InstancesĪs we have already mentioned rightsizing, scheduling, and Reserved Instances/Savings Plans, let’s start with these three AWS cost optimization best practices. The 10 AWS cost optimization best practices 1. This is an issue we aim to address below. Sometimes they don’t save a fraction of the cost that it's claimed they will, while plenty of other, often overlooked, AWS cost optimization best practices can save a lot more. These three “solutions” are probably the AWS cost optimization best practices most AWS users are familiar with, but they’re not necessarily the “best” best practices. The most common “solutions” to the reported issues are rightsizing, scheduling, and purchasing Reserved Instances/Savings Plans for predictable workloads. It’s not unusual to read headlines claiming businesses are overspending in the cloud, that a double-figure percentage of money is being wasted on unused services, or that millions of businesses provision resources with more capacity than they need.