Cost optimisation in AWS is important, but also hard! We will explain why understanding cost helps you not only save money but use the cloud smarter. We'll talk you through how to review and reduce costs and then cover some advanced topics, like querying the Cost and Usage Report (CUR) with Athena. We'll discuss some eye opening moments we've see with customers in certain services and some hints and tips on how to improve your knowledge and take advantage of AWS billing. (As presented at York AWS User Group meetup on 20th July 2022: https://www.meetup.com/york-amazon-web-services-user-group/events/286970133/)

1. COST
OPTIMISATION
Aled Sage - VP Engineering, Cloudsoft

2. Agenda
Why is it important & interesting
Company culture
Understanding cloud costs
Cost reduction
Some advanced techniques

3. Audience questions
How much experience do you have on AWS?
Who looks at AWS costs?
Are you responsible for AWS costs in your
company?

4. Control
Business value
Data-driven decisions

5. Wasted
Spend

6. Company Culture

7. Company Culture

8. Care about
customer value
Devops means giving a shit about your job
enough to not pass the buck.
Devops means giving a shit about your job
enough to want to learn all the parts and
not just your little world.
John E. Vincent

10. Finance
Procurement
CFO has
"fiduciary responsibility"

11. Cloud FinOps: Collaborative, Real-Time Cloud Financial Management
By J.R. Storment, Mike Fuller
Spend Panic: Tipping Point

12. Understanding
Cloud Costs

14. Per resource
Per usage
Commits (Savings Plans & RIs)
"Custom pricing"
Enterprise discount program

15. vs

16. AWS BILLING
SERVICE

18. COST EXPLORER

19. https://data.finops.org/

20. Budget Alerts
AWS Anomaly Detection

21. Cost allocation

22. Tags
C
o
s
t
c
e
n
t
e
r
Environment
O
wner
Application
name

23. EC2
RDS
S3
EBS
"PaaS products"
(Platform as a service)
Services by spend?
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/05/how-amazon-web-services-makes-money-estimated-margins-by-service.html
50%
20%
20%

24. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPkc6Ay4TBY

25. Reserved Instances
Savings Plans

26. Custom pricing
Enterprise Discount
Program

27. Terminate
Stop/pause
Use ephemeral envs

28. Right-size
Instance type
Instance family

29. EBS
Elastic Block Store

30. S3
Simple Storage Service

31. Beware the
unexpected!
AppStream mis-configuration
https://cloudsoft.io/blog/the-curious-case-of-the-spiralling-aws-lambda-bill
https://cloudsoft.io/blog/surprise-aws-config-costs-and-how-to-avoid-them
Keep tracking the costs
"Little utilities" need care as well
Can incur costs in surprising places
Takeaways:

32. Cost + engineering
expertise
Cost-performance tradeoffs
RDS SQL Server, instance type
choice.
Using instance store (r5d & m5d)
for tempdb
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/01/amazon-rds-for-sql-server-now-supports-tempdb-on-local-instance-store-with-r5d-and-m5d-instance-types/

33. CUR Query Library
Cost & Usage Report (CUR)
https://www.wellarchitectedlabs.com/cost/300_labs/300_cur_queries/

34. CUR Query Library
NAT Gateway - Idle NATGW
https://www.wellarchitectedlabs.com/cost/300_labs/300_cur_queries/queries/networking__content_delivery/#nat-gateway---idle-natgw

35. https://cloudsoft.io/services
info@cloudsoft.io
Questions?
aled.sage@cloudsoft.io
linkedin.com/in/aledsage
twitter.com/aledsage