Well Architected Framework WP - Cost Optimization Flashcards
Cost Optimization Pillar
pay lowest possible price while achieving business objectives
Cost Optimization Design Principles
transparently attribute expenditure
Use managed service to reduce cost of ownership
Swap capital expense for operating expense
Benefit from economies of scale
Stop spending on data center operations
Cost optimization definition - 4 areas
match supply and demand
cost effective resources
expenditure awareness
optimizing over time
Match supply and demand best practice
don’t over or under provision
Use things like autoscaling, or lambda which only responds when there’s a request
Use cloud watch to track demand
2 supply and demand questions
how do make sure capacity matches but doesn’t exceed requirements
how are you optimizing AWS usage
cost effective resources - best practices
using correct instance type is critical.
i.e. run app on T2 micro takes 7 hours and running it on M4.2 Large takes minutes. T2 Micro costs more because took longer
3 cost effective resources questions
Have you selected appropriate resource types for cost targets?
Have you selected appropriate pricing model to meet cost targets?
Are there managed service that will improve ROI
Expenditure Awareness best practices
AWS lets you provision things immediately but that has its own issues.
Be aware of what each team is spending and how
If org has multiple AWS accounts, consolidate billing, use cost allocation tags, billing alerts
Expenditure Awareness questions
what access controls and procedures do you have to govern AWS costs
How do you monitor spending and use
how do you decommission resources, or temporarily stop them, to ensure costs don’t accrue
how do you consider data transfer charges
Optimizing over time
AWS changes frequently. A service chosen yesterday may not be the best one today
Follow the AWS blog and use Trusted Advisor
Optimizing over time questions
how do you mange the adoption of new services
Key AWS Services for these 4 Cost Optimization Areas
Matched supply and demand:
autoscaling
Cost effective resources:
EC2 reserved instances, Trusted Advisor
Expenditure Awareness:
Cloudwatch alarms, SNS, historically consolidated billing and billing alerts
Optimizing over time:
AWS blog, AWS Trusted Advisor
How does AWS recommend optimizing speed for SQS buffer-based approach of matching supply / demand
Add EC2 Spot Instances
How does AWS recommend handling duplicate messages with SQS for buffer-based approach of matching supply / demand
Use FIFO Queues for exactly once processing
How does AWS recommend optimizing Kinesis for buffer-based approach of matching supply / demand
Provision a table in DynamoDB (a NoSQL db)
use idempotent processing so if message processed multiple times, no effect downstream
For time-based matching of supply / demand, can you use API’s to scale the instance size or class? How?
Yes
stop and start instance and choose different size or class. Can also do this for resources like EBS where you can snapshot and restore to a volume with more IOPS or different volume type
For time-based matching of supply / demand, what are the key services?
Auto Scaling and CloudFormation for templates
3 AWS ways of matching supply and demand
Demand-based
Buffer-based
Time-based
For demand-based matching of supply/demand what are the key services?
Autoscaling, ELB, Cloudwatch
How do you use the Reserved Instance Utilization Report?
to visualize your reserved instance utilization and find opportunities to increate your usage efficiency.
ie by modifying RI types or shifting workloads
How do you use the Reserved Instance Coverage Report?
to see how much of your overall instance usage is covered by reserved instances, so you can know if you should modify or purchase RI’s
How do you use the billing and cost management service?
to define budgets at aggregate or granular level
How do you use the detailed billing report with resources and tags (DBR-rt)?
To see hourly use and charges for all chargeable AWS services
Gives insight to cost and usage of systems on hourly basis
Can use Redshift to ingest this data and build app to report on it
Is the billing and cost management service integrated with IAM service?
Yes. Use IAM with it to control access to financial data and billing console
2 methods to organize and manage AWS costs
account structuring
tagging
Describe Account Structuring
parent-children structure
per account and linked accounts
Lets you assign accounts to different organizations in the company and have one paying account to oversee them
Describe Consolidated billing and one big benefit
construct between linked accounts and the payer account for oversight
maximizes volume discounts for services, reserved instances, etc.
Describe Tagging for cost optimization
AWS adds your tags to billing and cost allocation reports
allows higher levels of automation, ie list all resources with a “test” tag and delete or terminate them.
Useful for automating shutting down test environment at end of day
Describe lifecycle tracking for cost optimization
way of tracking entities that are no longer needed
AWS config gives detailed inventory of resources
CloudTrail and CloudWatch establish record of resource events
IAM managed groups, users, roles and federation
Key AWS Services for Expenditure Awareness
AWS Billing and Cost Management
Cost Explorer to visualize costs
Tagging to overlay business and org info to billing data
CloudWatch Alerts for billing alerts
2 main ways to optimize over time in AWS
Measure, Monitor, Improve
Staying ever green (move to newest services, features)
Describe the measure, monitor, improve method
perform gap analysis showing how system utilization aligns to requirements by measuring, monitoring users and applications
Work to minimize the gap
4 ways to minimize utilization gap
establish cost optimization function
establish goals and metrics
gather insight and perform analysis
report and validate
Describe staying evergreen
AWS frequently releases new services and features, so review your architecture to ensure it stays cost effective.
Be aggressive at decommissioning resources, components, workloads that are no longer needed
Key AWS Service for optimizing over time
AWS Trusted Advisor,
AWS Blog and What’s new section of website
