If you’re looking to reduce your AWS spend, read on.
It’s no secret that the range of cloud services offered by providers such as Amazon Web Services brings many benefits to your business. Despite this, complex usage pricing and a huge range of services (around 60 at this stage!) means that it can be challenging controlling your costs.
While many organisations move to the cloud expecting to save money, depending on how you’ve set things up you may find you’re spending more than you expected to. And while AWS discount vouchers sadly aren’t really a thing – Anchor has a few simple ways to reduce your AWS costs.
You can get a quick fix with the “AWS Caretaker” service – simply link Anchor as your billing provider and you’ll immediately benefit from our volume discounts. We should be able to reduce your AWS spend by 5-10% almost overnight, plus you’ll enjoy the benefits of vastly improved monitoring and reporting and you’ll have Anchor’s AWS certified technical support teams at your beck and call 24×7. With friendly month-to-month contracts, it’s a no brainer.
Alternatively, Anchor’s AWS Cost Savings Reporting Engine (available to our AWS Cloud Ops customers) provides deep visibility into your AWS environment usage, unearthing further opportunities to save money – up to 40% on your AWS bills. Our optimisation engine can recommend RI purchases for each instance type, OS and availability zone, the upfront cost of those purchases, and the estimated savings that will result from those purchases if you maintain your usage patterns.
Under normal circumstances, Amazon Web Services’ complex, usage-based pricing system makes it hard to control your costs. A read through “How AWS Pricing Works“, a quick scroll down Amazon’s EC2 pricing page or a minute or two with the “AWS Simple Monthly Calculator” tells the story.
You need to immerse yourself in the world of Reserved Instances (RIs); carefully considering your EC2 instance families and commit to a 1 or 3 year term while deciding whether you want to pay everything upfront, make a partial upfront payment or continue to pay as you go on a monthly basis.
Comparing breakeven points and exploring the differences between All-Upfront and Partial-Upfront Reservations while taking into account existing Reservations you’ve purchased in the context of your current deployment is a huge challenge – especially from a spreadsheet.
It can take hours (days!) to calculate how many reservations you need – and if you buy the wrong quantity or types of Reserved Instances, you could end up spending more money than you save.
While there is quite clearly some work to do and risks to consider, the savings you make can be significant:
Get in touch with our team if you’d like to understand how Anchor can help reduce your costs. A quick review of your AWS account and we’ll be able to give you an estimate of the savings we can deliver (and added value we can provide!) in no time.
Get in touch and reduce your next AWS invoice!
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