Whether you’re a cash-strapped startup or an enterprise optimizing spend, it pays to run cost-efficient architectures on AWS. This session reviews a wide range of cost planning, monitoring, and optimization strategies, featuring real-world experience from AWS customers. We’ll cover how you can effectively combine EC2 On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot instances to handle different use cases, leveraging auto scaling to match capacity to workload, choosing the most optimal instance type through load testing, taking advantage of multi-AZ support, and using CloudWatch to monitor usage and automatically shut off resources when not in use. We'll discuss taking advantage of tiered storage and caching, offloading content to Amazon CloudFront to reduce back-end load, and getting rid of your back end entirely, by leveraging AWS high-level services. We will also showcase simple tools to help track and manage costs, including the AWS Cost Explorer, Billing Alerts, and Trusted Advisor. This session will be your pocket guide for running cost effectively in the Amazon cloud.

1. © 2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Constantin Gonzalez, AWS (@zalez)
Markus Ostertag, Team Internet (@Osterjour)
October 2015
Running Lean Architectures
How to Optimize for Cost Efficiency
ARC302

2. What You’ll Get out of this Session
• A lower AWS bill
• A more scalable, robust, dynamic architecture
• More time to innovate
• Real-world customer examples
• Easy implementation

3. AWS Pricing Philosophy
Ecosystem
Global Footprint
New Features
New Services
More AWS
Usage
More
Infrastructure
Lower
Infrastructure
Costs
Reduced
Prices
More
CustomersInfrastructure
Innovation
50 price
reductions
since 2006Economies
of Scale

4. AWS Trusted Advisor
aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/trustedadvisor/
Free with Business or Enterprise Support

5. Iterate to Optimize Cost

6. Architecting for Low Cost

7. #1: Turn off Unused Instances

8. #1: Turn off Unused Instances
• Developer, test, training instances
• Use simple instance start and stop
• Or tear down and build up all together
using AWS CloudFormation
• Instances are disposable!

9. Customer Example
Monday Friday End of Vacation Season
35% saved

10. #2: Automate

11. Automate, automate, automate
• AWS SDKs
• AWS CLI
• AWS CloudFormation
• AWS OpsWorks
• Netflix Janitor Monkey
• Cloudlytics EC2 Scheduler
• Auto Scaling

12. How Auto Scaling Works

13. AWS CloudFormation Example
Launch Configuration
"LaunchConfig": {
"Type" : "AWS::AutoScaling::LaunchConfiguration",
"Metadata" : {
"AWS::CloudFormation::Init" : {
"config" : {
… packages, sources, files, services …
}
}
},
"Properties": {
"ImageId" : "ami-149f7863",
"InstanceType" : "m1.small",
"SecurityGroups" : [ {"Ref" : "WebServerSecurityGroup"} ],
"KeyName" : "MySSHKey",
"UserData" : { "Fn::Base64" : { "Fn::Join" : ["", [
"#!/bin/bash -vn",
… your user data script …
]]}}
}
}

14. AWS CloudFormation Example
Auto Scaling Group Definition
"WebServerGroup" : {
"Type" : "AWS::AutoScaling::AutoScalingGroup",
"Properties" : {
"AvailabilityZones" : [
"us-east-1a",
"us-east-1b",
"us-east-1c",
],
"LaunchConfigurationName" : { "Ref" : "LaunchConfig" },
"MinSize" : “3",
"MaxSize" : “6",
"DesiredCapacity" : “3",
"LoadBalancerNames" : [ { "Ref" : "ElasticLoadBalancer" } ]
}
}

15. Align Resources with Demand

16. “But my applications are
too small
for Auto Scaling!”

17. Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS)
• Easily manage Docker containers
• Flexible container placement
• Designed for use with other AWS services
• Extensible
• Performance at scale
• Secure

18. 10%
15%
7%
12%
20%
9%
Consolidate with Amazon ECS
App 1 App 2
App 3 App 4
App 5 App 6
6
12 34
5
Amazon ECS
Cluster

19. AWS Lambda
Amazon S3 Bucket Events AWS Lambda
Original object Compressed object
1
2
3

20. Get Rid of Idle Time with AWS Lambda
• Automatic scaling
• Automatic provisioning
• No need to manage infrastructure
• Just bring your code
• $0.20 per million requests, 1M free
• 100 ms payment granularity
• Never pay for idle
Less than 40% utilization?
Consider using AWS Lambda instead!

21. #3: Use Reserved Instances

22. Reserved Instance Basics
1y RI
Break even
3y RI
Break even

23. Reserved Instances Are Flexible
Can be moved between AZs
Can be moved between EC2-Classic
and EC2-VPC platforms
Size can be modified within the same
instance family

24. Track Savings over Time

25. Team Internet

26. Who Is Team Internet?
Domain monetization business
20 people
HQ in Munich, Germany
Tech-focused

27. DNTX.com

28. Reserved Instances – Our Usage

29. How to RI
Our rule of thumb: “An instance that runs 24/7 for more
than two weeks and can’t be stopped right now needs an
RI.”
Amazon EC2 reports to find On-Demand instances

30. Need to Buy RIs

31. #4: Use Spot Instances

32. Spot Instance Rules
• Price based on supply/demand
• You choose your maximum price/hour
• Your instance is started if the Spot price is lower
• Your instance is terminated if
the Spot price is higher, with 2 minutes notice
• But: You did plan for fault tolerance, didn’t you?

33. Spot Instance Example
On-Demand:
$0.24
$0.028 (11.7%) $0.026 (10,8%)
$3.28
(1367%)

34. Spot Instance Use Cases
• Stateless web/app server fleets
• Amazon Elastic MapReduce
• Continuous integration (CI)
• High performance computing (HPC)
• Grid computing
• Media rendering/transcoding
aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot

35. Spot Bid Advisor

36. Spot Instances Recap
• Very dynamic pricing
• Opportunity to save 80-90% cost
• But there are risks
• Different prices per AZ
• Leverage Auto Scaling!
• One group with Spot instances
• One group with On-Demand instances
• Get the best of both worlds
• Spot fleets – Manage thousands of
Spot instances with one API call

37. #5: Leverage Tiered Storage

38. Amazon S3
• Designed for durability of
99.999999999% of objects
• Designed for 99.99% availability,
with SLA
• Unlimited storage
• High throughput
• Easy to use
• Starting at $0.03 per GB,
automatic volume discounts

39. Amazon S3 Standard – Infrequent Access
Storage Class
• Same durability, same performance
• Slightly lower availability: 99.9%
• Starting at $0.0125 per GB of storage
• Minimum 30 days, minimum 128K billed per object,
$0.01 retrieval cost per GB
• 58% savings over Standard Storage
• Great for backups and near-term archiving
• Use Amazon S3 lifecycle rules!

40. Amazon Glacier Storage Class
• Same durability, performance, availability
• 3-5 hour restore time
• Starting at $0.007 per GB of storage
• Plus $0.05 per 1000 requests,
extra fees for restores beyond 5% of monthly average storage
• 77% savings over Standard Storage
• Long-term archives and backups
• Use Amazon S3 lifecycle rules!

41. #6: Optimize for Amazon DynamoDB

42. Optimize Capacity Units
Read/write capacity units (CUs) determine
most of DynamoDB cost
By optimizing CUs, you can save a lot of money
But:
• Need to provision enough capacity to avoid capacity errors
• Need to prepare for peaks
• Need to constantly monitor/adjust

43. Use caching to save read capacity units
• Local RAM caches at app server instances
• Check out Amazon ElastiCache
Think of strategies for optimizing CU use
• Use multiple tables to support varied access patterns
• Understand access patterns for time series data
• Compress large attribute values
Use Amazon SQS to buffer over-capacity writes

44. Amazon SQS Can Buffer Requests

45. Dynamic DynamoDB

46. DynamoDB GSI Tweak
Adding rows (1.5 KB – 2.5 KB) to table
Querying rows from Global Secondary Index
GSI with projection ALL
table GSI

47. DynamoDB GSI Tweak
Writes 1 KB, Reads 4 KB
GSI projection KEYS_ONLY
More reads but lesser writes
table GSI
< 1 KB

48. #7: Offload Your Architecture

49. Offload Your Architecture
• The more you can offload, the less
infrastructure you need to maintain, scale,
and pay for
• Three easy ways to offload:
• Introduce caching
• Use Amazon CloudFront
• Leverage existing Amazon web services

50. Cache Everything
MongoDB DynamoDB Amazon RDS
MongoDB DynamoDB Amazon RDS
ElastiCache

51. MongoDB Queries
Shut down 8 machines
Caching Saves Money
DynamoDB Reads
Saved 3k reads per second
(>20k reads per second in total)

52. Without negative caching
Cache Really Everything!
With negative caching
Cache hit ratio 25-30% Cache hit ratio 89-95%
Hit
Miss

53. Offload Popular Traffic to
Amazon S3 and/or CloudFront

54. Multiple Regions vs. CloudFront
EU
AZAZ
US
AZAZ
AP
AZAZ
Some kind of syncing between
the regions
ELB ELB ELB

55. Multiple Regions vs. CloudFront
AZAZ
CloudFront
EU APUS
ELB
US

56. Leverage Existing Services
• Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB or Amazon
ElastiCache for Redis, Amazon Redshift
• Instead of running your own database
• Amazon CloudSearch
• Instead of running your own search engine
• Amazon Elastic Transcoder
• Amazon Elastic MapReduce
• Amazon Cognito, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS,
Amazon SWF, Amazon SES, Amazon Kinesis,
and more …
Simple, more reliable, lower cost

57. Cost Monitoring & Analysis

58. AWS TCO Calculator

59. AWS Simple Monthly Calculator

60. AWS Billing Console

61. AWS Cost Explorer

62. AWS Billing Alerts

63. Let’s Recap
1. Turn off unused instances
2. Automate, automate, automate
3. Use Reserved instances
4. Use Spot instances
5. Leverage storage tiering
6. Optimize for Amazon DynamoDB
7. Offload your architecture

64. Thank you!
glez@amazon.com
markus@teaminternet.de

65. Remember to complete
your evaluations!