Cost Optimization - Decisions

Question 1

Factors that affect cost

Answer 1

• Resources are priced per region and per AZ
• EC2 size and type
• S3 storage class

Question 2

Tips to save money 1

Answer 2

• Use the appropriate EC2 payment model to your needs
• Take advantage of EC2 reservations / commitments. The same for RDS and DynamoDB
• Tag everything in order to organize and classify expenditures
• Use Service Control Policies (SCPs) to restrict available features. Can configure them at AWS Organizations

Question 3

Tips to save money 2

Answer 3

• Monitor everything to find out unused services, or scaled down other services
• Implement Auto scaling
• Implement offloading by using CloudFront, ElastiCache, or RDS read replicas. This reduces demand on backend services, and therefore capacity and costs
• Turn things off. Shutdown and delete resources that you don’t need

Question 4

Tips to save money 3

Answer 4

• Should always use AWS Free tier
• Have good governance of services with tools like IAM. Use Cost Explorer to know your current costs and predict them
• Automate whenever you can so you have tight control of costs

Question 5

Tools to monitor costs

Answer 5

• Use Billing to create Budgets
• Use Cost Explorer -> Savings plans -> Recommendations
• Use CloudWatch Alarms for Billing
• Use Trusted Advisor -> Cost optimization. Need a Business or Enterprise support plan to access it