BARCELONA

©2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved

©2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved

Optimizing Cost and Efficiency on

AWS

Inigo Soto

Practice Manager, AWS Professional Services

A Couple Assumptions…

1. You’re using AWS…

2. You like it!!

But maybe you are spending more

than you planned…

Or you’d just like to spend less

Cost Optimization Is…

Going From:

• Paying for what you

use

To:

• Paying for what you

need

What should you do?

We’ll Talk Through Some…

Frameworks Tools Best Practices

…And

Some examples

from other

customers like

you

Cost Optimization Strategies:

Policies and Processes

1. Limit Resource Provisioning…

By Controlling Who Can Provision

Resources…

2. Understand What is Deployed and What it

Costs…

By Employing Tags…

• Key (Attribute): 127 Unicode

characters

• Value (Detail/Description): 255

Unicode characters

• Tags per resource: 10 tags

Jane_Doe

…And Using The Different Types of Tags

Appropriately

Resource Tags

• Provide the ability to organize and search within and across resources

• Filterable and Searchable

• Do not appear in Detail Billing Report

• Only available on certain services or limited to components within a service (e.g. S3 bucket but not objects)

Cost Allocation Tags

• Provide the ability to map AWS charges to organizational attributes for accounting purposes

• Information presented in Detailed Billing Report and Cost Explorer (must be explicitly selected)

Tag Key Examples

Cost

Center

Business

Unit

Environ. Tier

Owner

Dept./

Group

Product /

Application

Shutdown

Time

Support

ContactEndpoint

Backup

Customer Example

Large

Financial

Services

Customer

“No tags? No

instance”

3. Proactively Monitor Your Account Billing

Usage…

By Using Detailed Billing Reports and

Enabling Billing Alerts…

…And Configuring Simple…

…Or Advanced Alarms in CloudWatch…

…Alongside Cost Explorer

http://amzn.to/1zHE2Fj

…Or Using an AWS Partner Tool…

Customer Example – Kellogg

“CloudWatch helps our people make

better decisions around the capacity

they need, so that they can avoid

waste…”

“We were never able to do that with

our on-premises infrastructure. AWS

breaks down usage and cost to such

a granular level that we can identify

which costs come from which

department, like a toll model.”

Best Practice: Manage How Resources are

Provisioned and Monitored

• Only allow specific groups or teams to deploy (certain) AWS

resources

• Create different environment (e.g. Dev/Test vs. Production) with

different policies for each

• Require tags in order to instantiate resources

• Monitor and send alerts or shut down instances improperly tagged

• Use CloudWatch to send alerts when billing thresholds are met

• Analyze your spend using AWS or Partner tools

Cost Optimization Strategies:

Architecture and Design

4. Design for Elasticity Rather Than Deploy for

Peak…

By Picking the Right Instance Type…

Instance

Type

vCPU Mem

(GiB)

Monthly

Cost (OD)*

Ideal use case

m3.medium 1 3.75 $48.24 Always available, balanced

m4.large 2 8 $90.72 Latest generation, always

available, balanced

c4.large 2 8 $79.20 Always available, compute

r3.large 2 15 $126.00 Always available, memory

g2.xlarge 8 15 $468.00 Always available, GPU

d2.xlarge 4 30.5 $496.80 Always available, storage

t2.medium 2 4 $37.44 Bursty workloads

* Assumes Amazon Linux Instances in US-East at 720 hours per month

…And Determine if Bursting Works For You

• 2vCPU, 4 GiB RAM

• Baseline performance: 40% (of a single core)

• Bursts beyond this based on CPU credits

• Less than $40 per month

• Use Cases: Web servers, dev, small

databases

• Additional Details: http://amzn.to/1sl2bKat2.medium

Customer Example – Nomura Research

For Nomura Research, the t2

instance provides enough

performance for a development

environment, remote desktop of

evaluation environment requiring

occasional CPU bursting

Customer Example – Kaplan

We quickly converted a hefty percentage of our systems to run under this EC2 Instance type, and have seen major cost reductions without affecting performance whatsoever.

For all instances built for Kaplan moving forward, the T2 is going to be the preferred option unless measured or load-tested computing needs demand otherwise.

Using Autoscaling….

Automatic resizing of compute clusters

based on demand

Trigger autoscaling policy

Feature Details

Control Define minimum and maximum instance pool

sizes and when scaling and cool down

occurs.

Integrated to

Amazon

CloudWatch

Use metrics gathered by CloudWatch to drive

scaling.

Instance types Run Auto Scaling for On-Demand and Spot

Instances.

AWS autoscaling create-autoscaling-group

— Auto Scaling-group-name MyGroup

— Launch-configuration-name MyConfig

— Min size 4

— Max size 200— Availability Zones us-west-2c

55 m4.large @ $0.126/hr

$207.90 / mo*

…And Adjusting for Utilization and

GranularityMore smaller instances vs. less larger instances

*Assumes Linux instances in US-East at 30 days per month

36 m4.xlarge @ $0.252/hr

$272.16 / mo*

Customer Example

Large

Aerospace

Customer

Challenge

Workloads arrive asynchronously

and require isolation

Solution

Use Amazon SQS and

Autoscaling Groups to launch /

terminate instances

5. Identify Idle Resources and Turn Off Unused

Instances…

…Using Trusted Advisor…

…Or Amazon CloudWatch to Monitor,

Collect and Track Metrics…

Amazon

CloudWatch

…Or (Again) Using an AWS Partner Tool…

Customer Example – Samsung

We are using AWS Trusted

Advisor to improve cost

efficiency and to audit the

configurations of service

platforms

Best Practice: Match Your Usage and

Capacity

Start

Choose an instance

that best meets your

basic requirements

Start with memory & then

choose closest virtual

cores

Look for peak IOPS

storage requirements

Tune

Use CloudWatch and

Trusted Advisor to assess

Change instance size up

or down based upon

monitoring

Expand

Run multiple instances

in multiple Availability

Zones

Use Autoscaling to scale

in and out based on

demand and usage (e.g.

spikes)

6. Architect Your Workload with Cost in Mind

Select Reserved Instances for Steady

State Workloads…Commitment Level• 1 Year

• 3 Year

AWS Services Offering RIs• Amazon EC2

• Amazon RDS

• Amazon DynamoDB

• Amazon Redshift

• Amazon ElastiCache

* Dependent on specific AWS Service, size/type and Region

Or Spot Instances for Non-Stateful (Time

Insensitive or Fault Tolerant) Workloads…

Minimum Commitment

• Commit to 1 hour

Tradeoff

• Potential for interruption

* Compared to On Demand price based on specific EC2 instance type, region and availability zone

…Or A Combination of All Three

1. Start by using RIs for

known/steady-state workloads

2. Set-up multiple autoscaling

groups

3. Autoscale first using Spot first

4. If Spot instances are

unavailable (or priced too

high), use On-Demand

0

2

4

6

8

10

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

/Spot

On Demand

Spot

Reserved Instance

And When You Have Excess RIs…

Use the Amazon

EC2 Reserved

Instance

Marketplace

http://amzn.to/1FkzUZp

Customer Example – Novartis

Goal:

Screen 10 million compounds against a common cancer target in < 1 week

Set Up:

10,600 AWS Instances

(39 drug design years in 9 hours)

Result:

3 promising compounds

Cost: $4,232

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

‒ 99.9% (read) availability vs. 99.99%

‒ Same durability

‒ Up to 60% savings

‒ Great for storing logs, backups…

• Amazon Glacier

‒ Same durability as S3

‒ 3 to 5 hours restore time

‒ Up to 75% savings

‒ Great for archiving, long-term backups

and old dataAmazon EFS

(Preview)

…Alongside AWS Managed or Application

Services…

Elastic Load

Balancing

(ELB)

Amazon Relational

Database Service

(RDS)

Amazon

ElastiCache

Amazon

DynamoDBAmazon Simple

Queue Service

(SQS)

Amazon Simple

Email Service

(SES)

Amazon

Lambda

Amazon Elastic

MapReduce

(EMR)

Amazon Simple

Notification Service

(SNS)

Amazon

Kinesis

Amazon

Route 53

Amazon

Redshift

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

Customer Example – Infospace

• Chooses the right instance types (using Cloudwatch)

• Uses Reserved Instances (reduced monthly costs by 28%)

• Monitors and turns off unused instances (own tool – Junkyard Dog)

• Offloads architecture by moving to Cloudfront

• Leverages App services: ELB, SNS, SES

• Uses Trusted Advisor

• Moves Data warehouse to Redshift

Cost Optimization Strategies:

Technology Updates

7. Be Cognizant of Technology Lifecycle

Updates

Including…

• New Instance

Types/Families (e.g. m4s)

• New Technologies (e.g.

Amazon RDS for Aurora,

AWS Service Catalog)

New

Prices

…And Remember to Use Consolidated

Billing• Receive a single bill for all

charges incurred across all

linked accounts

‒ Share RI discounts

‒ Combine tiering benefits /

Volume discounts

• View & manage linked accounts

• Add additional accounts

Best Practice: Pull all Levers Available

When Architecting Your Solution

• Utilize On-Demand, Reserved and Spot Instances

• Use the Amazon EC2 RI Marketplace when you have excess Ris

• Use the appropriate storage class based on your requirements (not

on what you use today)

• Use micro services where possible in your architecture

• Review your architecture when new services or technologies are

announced

• Use consolidated billing to take advantage of tiered pricing

Cost Optimization Strategies –

Putting It All Together

Cost optimization framework recap

Limit Resource Provisioning

Understand What is Deployed and What it Costs

Proactively Monitor Your Account Billing Usage

Design for Elasticity Rather Than Deploy for Peak

Identify Idle Resources and Turn Off Unused Instances

Architect Your Workloads with Cost in Mind

Be Cognizant of Technology Lifecycle Updates

BARCELONA