How to optimize costs for Microsoft workloads on AWS

The Microsoft on AWS Cost Optimization (MACO) recommendation guide is a collection of cost optimization strategies designed to help you optimize both new and existing Microsoft workloads on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It offers foundational training, cost optimization techniques, and reference architectures to build and automate cost-effective, high-performing workloads that meet business objectives. The MACO recommendation guide was created by 42 industry experts and provides real-world examples of how cost optimization can be applied to Microsoft workloads running on AWS.

Why the MACO guide, though? In today’s competitive business environment, you may be looking for ways to optimize costs. At AWS, one of the pillars of our Well-Architected Framework is Cost Optimization. We know it’s important for you to have a consistent way to ensure your Microsoft-based applications (or workloads) on AWS are using the most cost-effective, cloud-centric design patterns. An initial deployment strategy when moving to the cloud is often based on a lift-and-shift migration where you minimize changes to workloads to avoid impacting features and functionality. To address your cost concerns, you may have visited AWS documentation and blog posts for guidance. Having to perform your own cost analysis and making the changes may have proven challenging without having a consistent framework to follow. This is where the MACO guide gives you a consistent framework to reference for your cost optimization goals.

How can you cost optimize Microsoft workloads while migrating to AWS?

Cost optimization is an ongoing, recurring process that can be implemented whether you’re in a steady state or actively migrating your workloads. You can leverage the AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment (OLA) as a cost optimization tool to help determine ways you can optimize your workloads as they migrate from on-premises to AWS. This no-cost program empowers both new and existing customers to assess and optimize their on-premises and cloud environments by rightsizing workloads to enhance resource efficiency. An OLA provides an analysis of your actual resource usage (Compute, Memory, Disk), third-party licensing, and application dependencies. The data gathered will help you make informed decisions for your cloud journey.

There are various options for running an OLA. You can leverage existing monitoring tool output to provide a flat file of your data for AWS to analyze, or you can use a tool like Migration Evaluator to help collect the most complete analysis of your workloads. Migration Evaluator uses operating system agents to collect usage data from 14 to 30 days. This allows AWS to make informed instance sizing recommendations based on your application usage patterns. Once the data has been collected, you will receive a comprehensive report detailing findings and recommendations for your environment prior to beginning a migration.

Parsons Corporation used tools like Migration Evaluator and the AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment (OLA) to migrate to AWS. These provided visibility into their current on-premises environment and identified opportunities to optimize licensing, reduce downtime, and cut compute costs by right-sizing workloads in the cloud. After migrating their Windows Server and SQL Server workloads to AWS, Parsons was able to reduce annual operating costs by 35%. Overall, the migration to AWS allowed Parsons to increase system uptime, keep costs manageable, and speed up the development of new services from months to days, facilitating more innovation.

You can find more details about the entire process in the OLA section of the MACO recommendation guide. You’ll also find sample data reports and more details about the various collection methods available for analyzing your workloads.

How can you cost optimize existing Microsoft workloads running on AWS?

The MACO recommendation guide has over 40 cost optimization recommendations which can be applied to existing Microsoft workloads running on AWS. But if you’re looking for the best way to start cost optimizing your existing workloads, right sizing and reducing your compute costs are often the most effective tools.

Improve cost efficiency in your AWS environments with AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment. An OLA can also be used to assess and optimize existing AWS environments, based on actual resource utilization, third-party licensing, and application dependencies. By understanding existing deployments, application performance, and existing contracts, AWS can provide recommendations for rightsizing resources. This will provide a clear roadmap to reduce cost by aligning existing licensing investments with application resources demands, so you only pay for what you need.

Rightsize your compute workloads using AWS Compute Optimizer. AWS Compute Optimizer recommends more efficient AWS compute resources for your workloads, to reduce costs and improve performance. To make recommendations, it analyzes your existing Amazon EC2 instance configuration and utilization metrics. The compiled data is then used to recommend which Amazon EC2 instance types are best for the existing workload.

The MACO guide provides information on how to improve these AWS Compute Optimizer recommendation results. The EC2 rightsizing section shows how customers can improve their cost savings by 327% on average using AWS Compute Optimizer recommendations by installing the Amazon CloudWatch agent on their EC2 instances to collect memory utilization metrics.

In addition to rightsizing recommendations, AWS Compute Optimizer can also inform you how to reduce Microsoft SQL Server licensing costs by up to 74% by automating SQL Server edition downgrade identification for both license-included and bring-your-own-license (BYOL) Amazon EC2 instances.

Reduce your steady-state compute costs with Savings Plans. Once your workloads have been rightsized properly, Savings Plans can be used to save compute costs on your steady-state usage of Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate, and Amazon SageMaker. Savings Plans offer a flexible pricing model that can help you reduce costs when compared to On-Demand pricing. You receive a discount on usage when you commit to a consistent amount of hourly compute spending over one or three years.

Simplify the optimization process using AWS Cost Optimization Hub. For a simplified view of Savings Plans recommendations and AWS Compute Optimizer right sizing opportunities, visit the AWS Cost Optimization Hub. The Cost Optimization Hub allows you to easily identify, filter, and consolidate AWS cost optimization recommendations across your AWS accounts and AWS Regions within your organization through a single dashboard.

Review technology-specific optimization techniques using the MACO recommendation guide. If you’ve exhausted rightsizing opportunities and are looking for other ways to reduce your costs, view the MACO recommendation guide for cost saving strategies for .NET applications, Windows containers, SQL Server, Active Directory, and storage.

You’ve optimized to the best of your ability, now what?

Through the use of recurring cost optimization techniques, you will eventually get to a point where your existing application has been fully optimized within the bounds of its existing structure. If you have reached this point in your application lifecycle, in order to optimize further the next step could be to modernize.

Modernization is a broad topic that spans application code, infrastructure, and databases. AWS offers tools and services to help you modernize your application in each of these areas to further optimize workloads, and the MACO recommendation guide covers many of these topics in-depth.

For .NET workloads, modernizing to cross-platform .NET allows the applications to run on the Linux operating system, reducing the need for Windows Server licenses. Removing Windows Server licensing costs can lower the total cost of ownership per server by 25% or more. In addition, .NET applications running on Linux can take advantage of AWS Graviton ARM processors, which offer 45% better price-performance than x86 processors of the same generation. The AWS Toolkit for .NET Refactoring is an assistive tool that can help expedite the process required for developers to refactor .NET Framework applications to cloud-based alternatives on AWS.

Digiturk, beIN Media Group Company, was able to modernize their legacy .NET Framework monolithic application to a .NET microservices architecture on AWS, achieving 65% cost savings. With assistance from AWS Partner Kloia, they were able to reduce Windows licensing costs, increasing agility, and remove scalability bottlenecks caused by their monolithic architecture.

SQL Server workloads require additional licensing costs which aren’t necessary with many open-source and purpose-built databases. AWS offers Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL for customers who are looking to move off SQL Server to an open-source relational database while reducing the front-end application changes. As noted in the MACO recommendation guide, switching from SQL Server Enterprise edition on Amazon EC2 to Aurora PostgreSQL can save up to 70%.

BMC Software modernized their database workloads by migrating from Microsoft SQL Server to Amazon Aurora. The modernization effort reduced AWS infrastructure costs by 42%, eliminated SQL Server licensing costs, and increased their database team productivity by over 60%.

If you’re ready to consider modernizing your workloads, please visit the Windows Modernization page or speak with your account team to get started.

Conclusion

A cost optimized workload fully utilizes all resources, achieves an outcome at the lowest possible price point, and meets your functional requirements. The MACO team has subject matter experts available if you are ready to have in-depth conversations about cost optimizing your workloads; reach out to your AWS account team to start your cost optimization journey today.

AWS has significantly more services, and more features within those services, than any other cloud provider, making it faster, easier, and more cost effective to move your existing applications to the cloud and build nearly anything you can imagine. Give your Microsoft applications the infrastructure they need to drive the business outcomes you want. Visit our .NET on AWS and AWS Database blogs for additional guidance and options for your Microsoft workloads. Contact us to start your migration and modernization journey today.