With a full suite of public cloud cost optimisation services, AC3 are experts at helping you save money without compromising on speed and availability.

We spoke with the Customer Success team at AC3, to get their perspective on how cost optimisation will benefit businesses who are currently in the cloud.

Q: Why do businesses move to the cloud and look at cost optimisation strategies?

Businesses migrate to the cloud to take advantage of the cost effective ‘pay-as-you-go’ computing and the power of dynamic highly available resourcing and native security features. The flexibility and ease of use of the cloud is seeing footprints grow as more resources are consumed. This can result in increased cost and risk to businesses as they struggle to maintain visibility and control of their cloud portfolio.

With a well-defined migration strategy in hand, you can move your application/s to the AWS cloud and reduce capital expenses, minimise support and administrative costs, and retain the performance, security, and reliability requirements your business demands.

Most of the businesses we help are asking questions like:

  • “Why is my AWS bill so high? I thought I should be saving more when moving to the cloud.”
  • “How can I reduce AWS costs for Dev/QA environments?”
  • “What options do I have to bring down my AWS cost?”
Q: What tips would you offer customers to improve their optimisation strategies on AWS?

The workloads you run on AWS should always be optimised to take advantage of the Cloud value proposition. There are tools and approaches that you can use to optimise your AWS costs. In an ideal world, we would recommend reviewing your workloads and rearchitecting for costs, but we understand that you might not necessarily have the time to invest in such an exercise.

Here is a list of best practices and solutions to optimise AWS costs:

1. Keeping track of your Reserved Instances (RIs) usage and coverage– RI coverage and usage can be easily overlooked and can cost your company lots of money. Understanding the benefits of proper RI utilisation will help save on these costs. There are many offers and discounts available, helping reduce costs of up to 35% or 70% upwards.

2. Tracking underutilised RIs and decide when to give them up – You can look at reallocating underutilised RIs where they fit in. Otherwise, consider selling them on AWS Marketplace if you are not able to repurpose them.

3. Decommissioning or stopping unused resources - Terminating resources you no longer need or stopping resources that you don’t need to be active. Identifying and deleting those you no longer need can save you thousands of dollars. Keep an eye out for your unattached EIPs, unattached EBS, idle or unattached Load Balancers, incomplete S3 transfers & clearing old snapshots.

4. Instance rightsizing – The purpose of rightsizing is matching instance sizes to their workloads. However, it’s not as easy as it seems when some instances double in capacity for each increase in size. With this, it’s worth analysing utilisation metrics to find opportunities to move workloads to different areas that best suit their needs.

5. Selecting the right S3 storage class – Save costs without sacrificing performance by storing data across the S3 Storage Classes, which support different data access levels at corresponding rates. Amazon S3 offers a range of storage classes designed for different use cases based on how frequently you access the data. The S3 Intelligent- Tiering storage class, for example, is designed to optimize costs by automatically moving data to the most cost-effective access tier, without performance impact or operational overhead.

6. Conducting a Well-Architected Review - Applying a well-architected view on the workload, may further highlight performance and security aspects to ensure architecture best practices are implemented with a cost-lens as part of the workload or product roadmap.

7. Lastly, consider employing a team of certified cloud experts, like AC3, to provide you with effective cost recommendation strategies. If you are unable to do a review of your current cloud infrastructure and workloads, you can always lean to AC3 for support. We are a Trusted AWS partner and have resources and tools that will deliver you a set of measurable cost savings recommendations, averaging 15% reduction in monthly AWS Spend.

About Customer Success Team at AC3

The Customer Success Team is responsible for delivering predictable outcomes and experiences for our customers by driving retention and growth, understanding their business needs and helping them succeed; maintaining a cadence of communicating about their adoption trends, sentiment, and mining opportunities for deeper engagement. They also act as a trusted partner on use-cases and service functionality and product benefits and leverage experiences from other customers and AWS to deliver services that ensure success.