Here are 6 tips or tools for improving your Cost Optimisation strategies for AWS. Grab the free tools below to get a deeper cost insight on your account.

Trusted Advisor

The basic level of Trusted Advisor checks over 30 key metrics for Security and Service Limits, but the real gold is having Business or Enterprise supportwhich will let you access a larger range of checks (Cost Optimisation) and get programmatic access to the Trusted Advisor API. You can then monitor Reserved Instance (RIs) usage and under utilised or idle EC2 or RDS resources. Try the AWS tools https://github.com/aws/Trusted-Advisor-Tools which uses Cloudwatch Events and Lambda to help automate best practices.

Billing Alarms

Billing alarms allows you to be proactive about being notified about cost increases. Create a billing alarm on the Billing console. Set limits, (create multiple alarms for different thresholds $10, $50, $1000) and pair with SNS/Email notifications and when they are breached, you’ll be told. Grab this free cloudformation template for create a quick billing alarm.

Cost Explorer

Visualise your spend by resources. Use this AWS SAM (Serverless Application Module) function to generate a monthly excel report to have it delivered to your inbox. https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-cost-explorer-report

Resource Tagging Strategy

Use a tagging strategy to assist cost allocation by allowing cost reporting by tags. Consider the Business Tags suggestions on this page for some ideas. Tagging Strategies . Used in conjunction with the Cost Explorer script (update the Cost Tags), you can start to gain insights to new information.

AWS Simply Cost Calculator

This handy calculator lets you estimate resource costs before deployment, useful in some scenarios, but it has limited (hence the name: simple) options for some resource types. Good for a simple 3 tier app with typical storage and data transfer. Or maybe you just need a quick EC2 cost comparison tool to compare multiple instance types side by side.

AWS News

This is by far the easiest way to stay on top of new announcements and services (operational excellence) and another way to be cost aware. For example – M5 vs M4 EC2 will deliver 14% better price/performance on a per core basis. If you are still using M4’s consider a migration to the newer, faster (performance efficiency), cheaper (cost optimisation) technology

Got a RSS reader? no, get one – and subscribe to AWS News. I use a browser based one (do a search), so updates are only a click away.