Is your Cloud Bill soaring too high? In this presentation we will be exploring how to: -Drastically lower cloud spend and to more efficiently deploy, use, grow, and manage your cloud infrastructure. - Optimize storage to compute and everything in between. -Identify the best techniques, and how and when to use them. While the discussion will center around AWS, the same techniques can generally be applied to Azure, GCP, and others. You’ll leave this session ready to employ impactful cost optimization solutions to your environment that will start saving you money immediately.

1. I N T E L L I G E N T C L O U D O R C H E S T R A T I O N
© 2018 Xosphere, Inc.
Bring Your Cloud Bill Back
Down to Earth
Presented by Alan Hand
Founder and CEO of Xosphere
August 29, 2018

2. We live in a
cloudy world.
Are your cloud costs
soaring too high?
BRING YOUR CLOUD BILL BACK DOWN TO EARTH2

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Where are we spending?
70 %
20 %
10 %
Compute (EC2) Storage (S3 and EBS) Everything Else

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Cost Savings Tip #1
Buy Reserved

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EC2 Purchasing Options
On-Demand
Reserved
Spot
Dedicated Hosts

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Reserved Instances
Benefits: capacity reservation and discount
Types: standard, convertible, or scheduled
Term: 1-year or 3-years
Payment Options: All up-front, partial up-front, or no up-front
Attribute Matching: instance type, platform, tenancy, and AZ

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RI Best Practices
Target 70-80% of On-Demand usage to be Reserved
Buy in batches (2 to 4 per year)
Partial up-front is a good combination of savings and cash flow
Not just for EC2 – reserve other services like RDS, RedShift,
DynamoDB, ElastiCache, Elastic MapReduce, and CloudFront
Upload AWS Cost and Usage report to RedShift
Determine your Spot strategy before committing to Reserved

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Cost Savings Tip #2
Turn Sh*t Off
(and delete it)

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Elastic IP Addresses
aws ec2 describe-addresses --query
'Addresses[?InstanceId==null]' --output text
Look for Elastic IP addresses that are not bound to any instances:
And release them:
aws ec2 describe-addresses --query
'Addresses[?InstanceId==null]' --output text |
awk '{print $1}' |
while read id;
do aws ec2 release-address --allocation-id $id;
done

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Load Balancers
for i in `aws elb describe-load-balancers|sed -ne
's/"LoadBalancerName": "(.*)",/1/gp'`; do echo -n "$i ";
aws elb describe-load-balancers --load-balancer-name $i|grep
-c InstanceId;done | awk '{if ($2 == 0) {print $1}}'
Look for ELBs that have no attached instances
And delete them!
for i in `aws elb describe-load-balancers|sed -ne
's/"LoadBalancerName": "(.*)",/1/gp'`; do echo -n "$i ";
aws elb describe-load-balancers --load-balancer-name $i|grep
-c InstanceId;done | awk '{if ($2 == 0) {print $1}}' |
while read lb;
do aws elb delete-load-balancer --load-balancer-name $lb;
done

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EBS Volumes
aws ec2 describe-volumes --filters
Name=status,Values=available --query
Volumes[*].VolumeId --output text
Look for orphaned EBS volumes:
Check to make sure they aren’t needed.
aws elb delete-load-balancer --load-balancer-name
$lb
Now, double check.
Now, triple check.
Delete each one:

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EBS Snapshots
Use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) to automate
creation, retention, and deletion of EBS volume snapshots
aws dlm create-default-role
Create default DLM Role:
Create a DLM Policy:
aws dlm create-lifecycle-policy --description "My
first policy" --state ENABLED --execution-role-arn
arn:aws:iam::12345678910:role/AWSDataLifecycleManage
rDefaultRole --policy-details
file://policyDetails.json

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DLM Policy Example
{
"ResourceTypes": [
"VOLUME"
],
"TargetTags": [
{
"Key": "costcenter",
"Value": "115"
}
],
"Schedules":[
{
"Name": "DailySnapshots",
"TagsToAdd": [
{
"Key": "type",
"Value": "myDailySnapshot"
}
],
"CreateRule": {
"Interval": 24,
"IntervalUnit": "HOURS",
"Times": [
"03:00"
]
},
"RetainRule": {
"Count":5
}
}
]
}

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Trusted Advisor
Low utilization EC2 instances
Idle load balancers
Underutilized EBS volumes
Unassociated Elastic IP addresses
Idle RDS instances
Underutilized RedShift clusters
Route 53 latency resource record sets

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Cost Savings Tip #3
Schedule
Usage

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AWS Instance Scheduler
CloudFormation stack to control scheduling of resources
Works with EC2 and RDS
Configure Periods and Schedules using CLI, DynamoDB, or
CloudFormation
Apply tags to resources to schedule usage

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Scheduler Architecture

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Scheduler Installation

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Cost Savings Tip #4
Minimize Data
Transfer

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Data Transfer Optimization
Be careful with distributed systems like Cassandra, Kafka, etc.
Try to locate instances in the same AZ – big trade off
Use managed services like RDS, Aurora, etc. when possible
Use CloudFront as much as possible
Use S3 VPC Endpoint

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Cost Savings Tip #5
Use Latest
Generation

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Generation Cost Differences
$-
$0.050
$0.100
$0.150
$0.200
$0.250
$0.300
$0.350
$0.400
m1.xlarge m3.xlarge m4.xlarge m5.xlarge

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Cost Savings Tip #6
Set Storage
Retention
Policies

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S3 Storage Classes
Standard
Standard-Infrequent Access
One Zone-Infrequent Access
Glacier

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Object Lifecycle Management
Transition actions move objects between storage classes
Expiration actions delete objects
Standard-Infrequent Access is great for log files
One Zone-Infrequent Access only for reproducible data

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Lifecycle Configuration
<LifecycleConfiguration>
<Rule>
<ID>example-id</ID>
<Filter>
<Prefix>logs/</Prefix>
</Filter>
<Status>Enabled</Status>
<Transition>
<Days>30</Days>
<StorageClass>STANDARD_IA</StorageClass>
</Transition>
<Transition>
<Days>90</Days>
<StorageClass>GLACIER</StorageClass>
</Transition>
<Expiration>
<Days>365</Days>
</Expiration>
</Rule>
</LifecycleConfiguration>

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Cost Savings Tip #7
Leverage
Autoscaling

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Autoscaling Best Practices
Identify performance impacting metrics and monitor with
CloudWatch
Use cool down period
Ensure proper use of health checks
Use custom AMIs to speed up launch time
Use both event driven and scheduled autoscaling
Typical cost savings around 20-30%

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Cost Savings Tip #8
Don’t Be Afraid
of Spot

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What is a Spot?
Excess capacity offered at steep discounts
Market driven pricing
Can be interrupted with 2 minutes notification
Intended for fault tolerant applications
Pools defined by instance type, OS, and availability zone

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Spot Use Cases
Machine learning
Big Data analytics
Video transcoding
CI/CD Systems (Jenkins Plugin)

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Spot Best Practices
Diversify pools to increase availability
Set maximum bid to On-Demand price
Leverage Spot Fleet
Use Xosphere for apps with high availability requirements

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Cost Savings Tip #9
Right-size
Instances

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Right-size Solution
CloudFormation stack to analyze two weeks of utilization data
to provide right sizing recommendations
Must be run an individual accounts
Run no more frequently than every two weeks
Results output to CVS file in S3

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Solution Architecture

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Right-sizing Results

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Cost Savings Tip #10
Explore
Containers

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Why Containers?
Consistent environment, Run anywhere, Isolation
More efficient usage of hardware resources (typically 50%)
Easy to setup with EKS/ECS or other CaaS alternative
Spot friendly for additional savings when using Xosphere

39. Thank You
alan@xosphere.io 310.487.5851
BRING YOUR CLOUD BILL BACK DOWN TO EARTH39 © 2018 Xosphere, Inc.

40. BRING YOUR CLOUD BILL BACK DOWN TO EARTH
Xosphere Typical Savings
Without Xosphere With Xosphere
Reserved $19,696 $0
On-Demand $13,517 $4,505
Spot $0 $11,340
Xosphere License $0 $2,000
Total $33,213 $17,845
40
Scenario:
100 instances (50 m4.4xlarge, 30 c4.2xlarge, 20 r4.2xlarge) with 70% reserved for one year with no up-front
Monthly savings of $15,367 or 46%