If your cloud bill is a mess, here's what you can do right now
AWS, the pioneer of modern-day cloud computing, promised cost savings as one of its biggest advantages. For many, that promise remains frustratingly elusive. Cloud pricing may have been a little straightforward in the early days when compute hours and storage gigabytes were the only units of measurement. But over the years, AWS has introduced complex, multidimensional pricing metrics – provisioned IOPS, accelerator hours, inference requests etc. – that can nuke your budget if you’re not paying attention.
With this handy calculator, you’re given a real and tangible look at how much cost you can cut with the right tools. Compare savings between using emma and other Cloud Providers, and see for yourself!
In the long term, you could focus on rearchitecting applications and optimizing every layer of your cloud environment. But if your cloud bill is already a huge mess, we have some quick, high-impact fixes you can pull off right now to see big reductions in your very next cloud bill:
“Expedite the selection of spot instances and implement fallback strategies via emma’s intuitive dashboard. Even if a spot instance is terminated, emma will help you find and move the workload to the next available spot instance almost instantly.”
Maximize Spot Instance Utilization: AWS provides the steepest discounts (up to 90%) for Spot Instances, and you can switch to them right away. The only catch is that they can be terminated at two minutes’ notice. With the right insights and strategy, you can mitigate the risk and successfully use spot instances for a broader range of workloads.
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Amazon’s Spot Fleet feature lets you run both on-demand and spot instances in the same Auto Scaling group, so you can reserve some capacity for critical components. The emma cloud management platform uses advanced machine learning to analyze historical and projected workload needs and provides blended pricing insights. Use them to choose the most efficient mix of reserved and spot instances in your fleet.
Consider Savings Plans: AWS Compute Savings Plans provide more flexibility and coverage compared to RIs (Reserved Instances). They apply automatically to EC2 instances once usage crosses the minimum threshold, regardless of the instance family, size, AZ, Region, OS or tenancy. If you shift a workload from California to N. Virginia or move a workload from EC2 to Fargate or Lambda, you will still pay the Savings Plans price. In comparison, RIs tie you to a specified instance type and size, increasing the potential for unused or underutilized RIs.
emma users can get in touch with our cloud architects to evaluate workload demands and create a tailored plan for various savings plans and instance types.
Bonus Tip: If you have idle reservations, don’t let them sit idle – that’s free money for AWS. Use them for applications running on on-demand instances, or sell them in the Reserved Instance Marketplace.
“Use emma’s Project Limits to … prevent development teams from unnecessarily setting up development and test environments in low-availability, overly expensive regions. ”
EC2 instance prices are different for various regions and Availability Zones. For example, a t3a.xlarge instance costs approximately $0.18/hour in US West (N. California) but only $0.15/hour in US West (Oregon). In most cases, the performance impact between these regions is negligible due to their close proximity, but the price difference can be huge, depending on the demand and the availability of a specific instance type in a given region.
Unless you have 70 to 80% of your user base in a specific region, the price difference across regions is rarely worth paying for. Move your instance to nearby, cost-effective regions to start saving instantly.
Compare Regional Prices: With emma, you can instantly see all available options for an instance type – every region where that instance family is offered along with real-time pricing to help you choose the best deal.
Just select AWS as your chosen provider and specify your required VM configuration or instance type to explore all options. You can also specify your preferred regions to meet regulatory requirements and find the best available options within those constraints.
Set Project Limits for Regions: Use emma’s Project Limits to restrict the regions in which developers can deploy certain projects and workloads. This feature is primarily for regional compliance, but you can use it to prevent development teams from unnecessarily setting up development and test environments in low-availability, overly expensive regions.
Your development team is (hopefully) using development and testing environments for eight hours each workday, but those resources may still be running 24/7. Over time, this adds up to massive, unnecessary costs. It’s all too common for a developer’s test cluster to outlive its original purpose, running for weeks or even months after the project has ended or the engineer has moved on.
Shut Down Test Resources After Hours: You can save up to 76% on your cloud bill for test environments by using emma’s scheduling capabilities to automatically turn off test resources after work hours.
But what if your teams are working flexible hours or across time zones?
Set Project Limits for Accountability: Allocate budgets and set cost limits for different teams and projects using emma’s Project Limits. Each user can track their utilized and remaining budget in real time. emma also notifies teams before they exceed their budget, fostering greater responsibility and accountability in resource usage. Set these limits now to encourage developers to manage their resources efficiently, especially when automation isn’t an option.
“emma’s private networking backbone connects different regions and clouds, allowing you to slash public Internet egress costs by 80%.”
Data transfers within the same AZs are typically free or charged at a standard $0.01/GB in most regions. However, moving data between regions, out of AWS, or even across AZs is a different story. If unnecessary internet egress and inter-region transfers are racking up your cloud bill, you should optimize your workload placement to reduce egress costs.
Use Private Connectivity: emma’s private networking backbone connects different regions and clouds, allowing you to slash public Internet egress costs by 80%. Intelligent routing dynamically chooses optimal data transfer paths in terms of both cost and performance. Simply choose emma’s connectivity centers in your desired regions and hit “enable” to connect them all.
Implement Smart Workload Placement: Audit and analyze data transfer patterns using emma’s detailed cost breakdown. Identify expensive cross-region data transfers and optimize workload and data placement by transferring all interacting workloads and services within the same region and AZs.
Optimizing your AWS environment isn’t just about automation – human expertise is just as essential for spotting budget leaks and uncovering hidden savings. Here are a few quick, impactful fixes that our experts frequently identify and recommend and you can start implementing right now:
Identifying and implementing these cost-saving measures requires a comprehensive view of your AWS environment and deep cloud expertise. For organizations without a dedicated cloud cost management team, emma’s professional services give you access to expert support from our seasoned cloud architects and engineers, who make sure you’re not leaving potential savings on the table.
Interested in finding out what’s draining your AWS budget and how to fix it? Try emma with a 14-day trial or request a personalized demo session today!
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