In this session, we explore techniques, tools, and partner solutions that provide a framework for monitoring, analyzing, and automating cost savings. We look at several case studies and real world examples where our customers have realized significant savings. Some of the specific topics covered are migration cost management, cost-effective architectures, saving money with microservices, serverless computing with AWS Lambda, cost vs. performance vs. value, AWS purchasing strategies, tools and services from both AWS and our partner solutions that can help with cost optimization. Finally, we roll all of these into an automated process for continuous optimization.

1. © 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Paul Chen – Head of Solutions Architect, AWS ASEAN
10th Apr 2017
Dollars and Sense
Technical Tips for Continual Cost Optimization

2. Money vs. Value
- https://flic.kr/p/ActK3Z

3. Other customers have done this, so can you!
Saves $90,000 / month on unused instances

4. Tools
https://flic.kr/p/5mcmJC
AWS tools
§ Amazon CloudWatch
§ Trusted Advisor
§ Billing alerts
§ Cost Explorer
§ AWS Budgets
§ Consolidated Billing
Monitoring
§ Unused Resources
§ Underused Resources
§ Forecast

5. Detailed Billing Reports & Billing Alerts

6. Trusted Advisor: Enterprise Strength Monitoring and
Optimization
Monitors and
recommends
optimizations for:
§ Cost
§ Security
§ Fault Tolerance
§ Performance
“Over the last couple years, we’ve sent more than 2.6 million Trusted Advisor
notifications that have saved customers over US$350 million dollars.”

7. Cost Explorer

8. Partner solutions

9. CloudHealth
§ Rightsizing
§ RI recommendations
§ Retrospective tagging (Dimensions)
§ API
§ Datadog integration

10. Cloudability
§ Rightsize EC2 (and other services)
§ Storage and Database optimizations
§ RI recommendations
§ API

11. Tactics
https://flic.kr/p/5ZcoBm
§ Monitoring and forecasting
§ Kill Zombies!
§ Rightsize your instances
§ Avoid complexity where possible

12. Leverage The Right Storage Classes…
AWS Cloud
Amazon
Glacier
Gateway Appliance/
AWS Storage Gateway
Amazon
S3
Block File
On-premises Data Center
Archive Backup Disaster
Recovery
Amazon
EBS
§ Amazon S3 Infrequent Access
• For data accessed less than two times a
month
§ Amazon Glacier
• Same durability as S3
• 3 to 5 hours restore time
• Up to 65% savings
• Great for archiving, long-term backups
and old data
Amazon EFS

13. Use AWS Managed or Application
Services…
Elastic Load
Balancing
(ELB)
Amazon Relational
Database Service
(RDS)
Amazon
ElastiCache
Amazon
DynamoDB
Amazon Simple
Queue Service
(SQS)
Amazon Simple
Email Service
(SES)
AWS
Lambda
Amazon Elastic
MapReduce
(EMR)
Amazon Simple
Notification Service
(SNS)
Amazon
Kinesis
Amazon
Route 53
Amazon
Redshift

14. Choose the right EC2 pricing plan for your business…
On-Demand
Instances
Reserved
Instances
Spot
Instances
Pay as you go for computing
power
Flat hourly rate, no up-front
commitments
Pay an up-front fee for a
capacity reservation and a
lower hourly rate (up to 72%
savings)
1-year or 3-year terms
RI Marketplace: Buy RIs with
short remaining terms
Pay what you want for spare
EC2 capacity: your instances
run if your bid exceeds the
Spot price
Potential for large scale at
low cost: When they’re
available, take advantage of
1,000s of Spot Instances at
up to 90% savings

15. Reserved Instances for Always-On Instances
Commitment level
1 year
3 year
AWS services offering
Reserved Instances
Amazon EC2
Amazon RDS
Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon Redshift
Amazon ElastiCache
* Dependent on specific AWS service, size/type, and region

16. Use Reserved Instances…
§ You commit to pay for an instance for one or three years
§ We reserve the capacity, and offer you considerable savings over On Demand
during the term
§ You decide how you pay:
§ No Upfront (Just hourly charges for all hours of the term)
§ Partial Upfont (Upfront Payment, plus hourly charges for all hours of the term)
§ All Upfront (Upfront Payment only)

17. 6x
increase
17%
M-1
15%
M0
91%
M1
92%
M2
RI
OD
SPOT
Key
16%
M-2
93%
M3
Improving EC2 RI Usage with Convertible Reserved Instances
(Bar: EC2 Instances by Purchase Option [count])

18. 39%
Unit Cost
Decrease
17%
M-1
15%
M0
91%
M1
92%
M2
RI
OD
SPOT
Key
16%
M-2
93%
M3
Improving EC2 RI Usage with Convertible Reserved Instances
(Bar: EC2 Instances by Purchase Option [count])
(Line: Cost per Normalized Instance Hour [usd])
Unit Cost*
*Upfront portion amortized
over life of RI

19. With Spot the rules are simple
Markets where the price of
compute changes based on
supply and demand.
You’ll never pay more than your
bid. When the market exceeds
your bid you get 2 minutes to
wrap up your work.

20. 50% Bid
75% Bid
You pay the
market
price
Bid Price vs. Market Price
25% Bid
¢
50% of OD
75% of OD
25% of OD

21. Easily use EC2 Spot
instances for
production workloads
Amazon EC2 Spot Bid Advisor
1) We make this easy using the
Spot bid advisor
2) With deliberate pool
selection and bidding, you
will keep your Spot instance
as long as you need to.
3) And with new features like
Spot fleet diversified we do
the heavy lifting for you...
¢

22. § Base Price - On Demand: No Commitment, Pay only what you use,
no capacity reservation but once started no interruption
§ 10% less - Scheduled Reserved Instances: Commit to Schedule
of at least 1200 hours for one year, capacity reservation
§ 30-60% less - Standard Reserved Instances: Commit to one or
three years, capacity reservation
§ 40-60% less - Spot Blocks: Bid for 2-6 hours blocks of
uninterrupted time
§ Up to 85% less - Spot: Bid for instances, interrupted if market price
higher than your bid price, 2mins advanced notice
EC2 Cost Optimization Option for Every Need

23. Advanced Tactics
https://flic.kr/p/dpFTX5
Augmented Auto Scaling
Offloading
Licensing
SaaS Considerations

24. Auto Scaling – It’s not just for Instances!
Adjust DynamoDB IOPs on the fly:
§ Dynamic DynamoDB
https://github.com/sebdah/dynamic-dynamodb
§ DynamoDB Lambda Autoscale
https://github.com/channl/dynamodb-lambda-autoscale

25. 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

26. To Offload Your Architecture…
+
Standard Setup
§ 4 x Medium Instances
$193
§ AWS Data Transfer 1 TB
$92
§ Total = $285
Optimized
§ 1 x Medium Instance
$48
§ CloudFront Data 1 TB
$87
§ CloudFront Requests (10M)
$7.5
§ Total = $142.5
50%
6X
Cheaper
Faster

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

28. Caching Saves Money
DynamoDB Reads
Saved 3k reads per second
(>20k reads per second in total)
Saved 20k reads per second!

29. License flexibility via Dedicated Hosts
When running Microsoft Workloads, for example:
§ Instance-host affinity allows you to comply with the 90-day rule
§ Per-core and per-socket visibility enables reporting at the
physical level
§ Placement controls ensure that instances run on the server you
want them to, helping you meet stringent compliance and
regulatory requirements
§ AWS Config allows you to record when instances start, stop, or
are terminated for license reporting and true-ups

30. SaaS Specific Tactics
SaaS provides new vectors for optimization:
§ Allocate cache to your most demanding users
§ Grant different instances to different customers
§ AWS Lambda cost model matches the pricing model of SaaS

31. Continuous Cost Optimization
https://flic.kr/p/8Khkek
§ Monitor and Forecast continually
§ Actively Manage
§ Clean up your own mess
§ Architect for value
§ Purchase wisely
§ Invest in tools and automation

32. Virtuous Cycle
Cost
Tactics
MonitorTune

33. Thank you!