Even with the low cost of cloud computing, DevOps and finance teams need to continuously manage their costs. With the availability of AWS features like resource tagging, detailed billing, and Reserved Instance (RI) purchases, customers can efficiently monitor, allocate, and control their spend. However, making the most of these services requires implementing the right strategies and ongoing monitoring. For most customers, automating that process offers significant advantages. Review this webinar to learn how CloudCheckr helped DreamBox Learning reduce costs with customizable reports, cost optimization recommendations, and automated best practices implementation. Hear from DreamBox Learning how they were able to reduce their spend by nearly 30% while freeing up internal resources. Learn how to: - Use tags to track and allocate spend by business unit, department, or team - Identify idle and underutilized resources - Evaluate RI purchases and other opportunities for cost savings

1. AWS Cost Management
Tracking, Allocating and Controlling Spend in the
AWS Environment with CloudCheckr

2. Welcome
Maya Cabassi
Partner Marketing Manager
Amazon Web Services

3. Webinar Overview
 Submit Your Questions using the Q&A tool.
 A copy of today’s presentation will be made available on:
 AWS SlideShare Channel@ http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/
 AWS Webinar Channel on YouTube@ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT-
nPlVzJI-ccQXlxjSvJmw

4. Kyle Lichtenberg
Solutions Architect
Amazon Web Services
Aaron Newman
Founder
CloudCheckr Inc.
Introducing
J.B Krewson
Dir. Technical Operation
DreamBox Learning

5.  Intro to Amazon Web Services and Cost Management
 Overview of CloudCheckr cost optimization tools for AWS
 Case study: how DreamBox Learning reduced spend by nearly 30%
 Q&A
What We’ll Cover

6. One of the primary reason
businesses are moving so quickly
to AWS and the cloud is
increased agility.

7. Enterprises Can’t Afford to be Slow
Add New Dev Environment
Add New Prod Environment
Add New Environment in APAC
Add 1,000 Servers
Remove 1,000 Servers
Deploy 1 PB Data Warehouse
Shut down 1 PB Data Warehouse
AWS:
Infrastructure in Minutes
Old World:
Infrastructure in Weeks

8. Global Services
* China (Beijing) Region-
EC2 Availability Zones: 1 Coming Soon
10 Regions*
26 Availability Zones*
51 Edge Locations

9. A Culture of Innovation
On-Premises
Experiment Infrequently
Failure is expensive
Less Innovation
Experiment Often
Fail quickly at a low cost
More Innovation

10. Cost Savings and
Flexibility

11. Source: IDC Whitepaper,
sponsored by Amazon, “The
Business Value of Amazon Web
Services Accelerates Over Time.”
December 2013
1
“Average of 400 servers
replaced per customer”
Replace up-front
capital expense with
low variable cost
2
42 Price
Reductions
Economies of scale
allow AWS to continually
lower costs
4
Save more money as
you grow bigger
Tiered Pricing
Volume Discounts
Custom Pricing
3
Pricing model choice
to support variable &
stable workloads
On-Demand
Reserved
Spot
Dedicated
How can you achieve lower TCO with AWS?

12. Pricing Models on AWS
On-Demand
Pay for compute capacity
by the hour with no long-
term commitments
For spiky workloads,
or to define needs
Reserved
Make a low, one-time
payment and receive a
significant discount on the
hourly charge
For committed utilization
Spot
Bid for unused capacity,
charged at a Spot Price
which fluctuates based on
supply and demand

14. AWS Cost Management
Tracking, Allocating, and Collaborating
Spend in the AWS Environment
Aaron C. Newman
Founder, CloudCheckr
Aaron.Newman@CloudCheckr.com

15. Reserved Usage Best Practices
• Different type, regions, sizes, time frames
• All offer different ROIs
• Calculate Return on Investment
• Total Savings / Upfront cost
• ROI highly dependent on your usage
• How many hours, transactions, requests, etc…
Use EC2 spot instances when possible

16. Different Strategies for Buying RIs
• Analyze Usage by Instance
• Look at how many hours each instance is running
• Analyze Usage by Frequency
• Look at number of hours running by hour and instance type
• Track your expected usage
• Use tagging strategies
• How likely to keep running an instance?
• Can you reassign unused Reserved Instances?

17. Types of Reserved Usage
EC2 Reserve Instances Most commonly used, a lot of factors to understand
RDS Reserved DB Instance Often a better option for purchase, database are more stable
ElastiCache Reserved Nodes https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/pricing
DynamoDB Reserved Capacity https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/pricing
CloudFront Reserved Capacity Pricing https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing

18. Best Practices for Resource Utilization
• Locate and eliminate idle resources
• Right-size resources
• Don’t under or over-utilize
• Use Auto Scaling Groups
• Design your applications
• to scale up and down
Check on ALL your resources:
EC2, EBS, ELBs, RDS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, etc…

19. Build a Tagging Strategies
• Tag your resources so you can allocate costs
• Tie costs to applications and resource owners
• Provides visibility into what you are spending
• Identify and classify costs
• So that you can reduce them
• Locate and eliminate untagged resources
You can’t optimize what you can’t measure

20. Use Consolidated Billing
• Create a master payer account
• Link all your accounts from there
Advantages includes:
• A single view on all costs
• Reserved Instance usage
• works across consolidated accounts
• Pricing tiers are compressed
• Overall reduced bill

21. DreamBox Learning
• DreamBox Learning© is an online elementary math
program that raises student performance and
confidence
• DreamBox combines engaging, adaptive lessons with
the up-to-date reporting educators need to individualize
instruction
• Our software and our company are based on agility:
rapid adaptation and improvement. We need the same
qualities in our infrastructure
AWS gives us the agility and services we need, but managing
and optimizing choices can be tricky
Online Math Education

22. How We Use AWS
• Diverse services
• S3, EC2, RDS, ElastiCache, CloudFront, Route53, others
• Heavy use of auto- and scheduled scaling
• Always adding, changing components
• Multiple complex pre-production environments
• Our challenge:
• Use the right resource for every need
• Eliminate cost surprises
• Reduce staff time needed to track costs

23. What We Need To Know
• Are we using Reserved Instances effectively?
– How to spot opportunities to sell RIs?
– How to buy exactly the right type and count of RIs?
• Where are costs increasing too fast?
– Which services’ costs increase faster than traffic?
• Where should we be looking for savings?
– Better to save 5% off $100, than 50% of a dime.

24. How CloudCheckr Helped
• Are we using Reserved Instances effectively?
– “Best Practices” cost report
• Where are costs increasing too fast?
– Daily and Weekly reports that highlight big increases
• Where should we be looking for savings?
– “Top 10 most expensive” report
– “Resource Utilization” reports
– AWS Billing drill-down tool

25. What We’ve Learned
• Use the right type of instance:
– OK if it is interrupted? Not time critical? USE SPOTS
– Running all the time, can’t be interrupted? USE HEAVY RIs
– Running 2/3 of the time, can’t be interrupted? USE LIGHT RIs
– Runs less than 2/3 of the time, can’t be interrupted? DEMAND
• Not all RIs are equal:
– EC2 reservations can be modified and resold. We are
aggressive in buying these
– RDS and ElastiCache reservations are a firm commitment. We
are much more cautious about buying these
• Stay on top of storage, particularly AMIs and Snapshots

26. Sep-13 Oct-13 Nov-13 Dec-13 Jan-14 Feb-14
EC2 Demand
EC2 RI
EC2 Other
RDS
OTHER
Traffic
CloudCheckr Cost Control Impact
CloudCheckr
SchoolYearBegins
Coststrackwithload
CoststrackWORSEthanload
Costs DROP
while load increases

27. Contacts and Q&A
CloudCheckr:
Sign up for a free evaluation at:
App.cloudcheckr.com
CloudCheckr Contact: Aaron Newman
aaron.newman@cloudcheckr.com
AWS Contact:
aws.amazon.com/contact-us