AWS’s (Amazon Web Services) breadth of services and pricing options extend the flexibility to effectively manage your AWS cost optimization and keep the performance and capacity per your business requirement. While the fundamental process of cost optimization on AWS remains the same – monitor your AWS costs and usage, analyze the data to find savings, take action to realize the savings; in this blog we will take a more tactical approach of AWS savings plans and reducing cost with changes in user demand.

AWS lets you control costs and continuously optimize expenditures while building modern, scalable applications to meet your needs. AWS’s extensive service and pricing options provide the flexibility to manage costs while maintaining the effective performance and capacity you need.

Companies can reduce AWS bills, boost performance, and manage capacity effectively using AWS. In addition, users can improve their economic structure through various pricing and billing models. While AWS is widely used, optimizing costs can be difficult for many organizations. The article aims to share the process of planning and decision-making about AWS costs.

The AWS Free Tier allows customers to explore and try out AWS services free of charge up to specified limits for each service. We can test services in a free tire account without any charges with limitations. The below image shows some of the AWS free tire services and their limits.

We can use AWS cost explorer to identify instances with low usage. By using this service, we can identify instances with low utilization.

Using the Amazon Lambda function and Amazon Event Bridge, we can schedule the instances to Start/Stop by Cron expression.

As shown below, we can use a schedule that regularly runs, such as minutes/hours/days.

By using this service, we can stop instances on weekends or non-productive days or schedule to start/stop in different work regions.

We can lower our costs with the pause and resume actions on the Amazon Redshift cluster. We can take this action perforce in the AWS console with simple steps. For the Schedule name, enter a name for this schedule. Optionally, for Starts and ends on, enter the dates and times to start and end the schedule. For pause every and resume every, choose the time and day to pause and resume Choose Schedule recurring pause and resume. We can use cron Syntax as well.

To automatically scale your DynamoDB table, use the Auto Scaling feature. You can allow Auto Scaling on your existing tables. Alternatively, you can also use the on-demand option. This option allows you to pay-per-request for reading and writing so that you only pay for what you use, making it easy to balance performance and costs.

To reduce costs, first snapshot the volume in case you need it later, then delete these volumes. We can use this method when the EBS is low usage.

Use Spot instances to reduce costs by up to 90%. Using EC2 Auto Scaling you can launch both On-Demand and Spot instances to meet a target capacity. Auto Scaling automatically takes care of requesting for Spot instances and attempts to maintain the target capacity even if your Spot instances are interrupted.

Use one year or more terms to get discounts On-Demand pricing.

Use cost and usage reports to analyze your expenses. Use AWS Trusted Advisor to view your expense forecast and to find unused resources. Create a budget plan for your resources.

The cost of AWS varies by region. As well as that, data transfers between availability zones are charged an additional fee. For this reason, you should centralize your operations and use single availability zones if you wonder how to reduce data transfer costs on AWS.

These are some of the strategies that can help you find AWS savings plans & cost-saving opportunities in your AWS environment. By Implementing the above steps, we saved almost 31% percent of the cost compared to the previous month’s bill, as you can see below.