Reduce Your AWS Spending With These 16 Tips

In a new white paper, Opus Interactive outlines sixteen tips for lowering your AWS spending. The paper explains popular, yet often overlooked tools that can be used to help you make informed decisions about how to best allocate AWS resources and reduce costs.

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According to a new white paper from Opus Interactive, “AWS is quickly becoming the default choice for public cloud providers, due in part to the many advantages it offers businesses.” One of the top advantages the service offers is significant cost savings – but to achieve those savings, the paper says organizations must shift their strategy. This includes leveraging the tools AWS provides to monitor resource usage.

Opus Interactive says, “by understanding how your applications are using AWS resources, you can make informed decisions about how to allocate these resources and reduce costs.” Their new white paper outlines 16 tips and tools that companies can use to evaluate current AWS spending and plan for the future.

The paper organizes the tips and tools into categories. The author begins with general tips and best practices, including a recommendation to start by talking to your cloud partner. They note that credits or discounts may be available based on the size of your business or the level of resources consumed. The key to accessing these discounts is to “know an account manager and to be transparent” about what you’re doing, according to the paper.

Although we talk about public cloud flexibility and the shift from CAPEX to OPEX, some of the AWS features that reduce your invoice, namely reserved instances (RIs) and saving plans, would ironically look like going back to CAPEX. However, with an actual discount of over 50%, they should be on everyone’s “best practices for implementation” list.  – Opus Interactive, “16 Powerful Tips to Lower your AWS Spending“

The next section of tips and tools in the paper focus on EC2 instances. The paper highlights how your AWS spending can be reduced by selecting appropriate EC2 instance types, preferring the most modern CPUs, considering EC2 instance store for temporary data, making use of spot instances, and aiming to predict the use of services and commit upfront.

Other tips and tools covered in the white paper include those around object storage and monitoring and management.

Download the full report for more information on the tools you can use to reduce your AWS spending.