Achieve cost effective cloud operations with AWS Managed Services

As organizations increasingly adopt cloud services, they often face the challenge of hosting diverse workloads with varying cost structures and budget constraints. To establish a solid foundation for cost optimization without compromising operational efficiency in your cloud operations, it’s essential to manage your cloud expenses efficiently. This aligns with the AWS Well-Architected Cost Optimization pillar, which emphasizes the importance of effective cost management in achieving operational excellence in the cloud.

Therefore, your cloud adoption should involve actively monitoring costs and implementing cost-saving strategies. This requires finding a balance between meeting specific operational needs and following cost optimization best practices. For teams operating scalable workloads in AWS, this process can be time-consuming, particularly when they are new to AWS on a larger scale. In certain situations, IT teams may have limitations in terms of their size and may need to prioritize higher-level automation and innovations that have a direct impact in delivering value to customers. By leveraging AWS Managed Services (AMS), these challenges can be addressed. AMS helps you achieve operational excellence by executing your cloud operations at scale, enabling you to operate more efficiently and securely in the cloud while leveraging AWS services. AMS also facilitates proactive cost monitoring, addresses cost overruns, and implements cost-saving strategies, allowing your teams to focus on value-added services.

In this blog, we will provide an overview of AWS cost optimization, covering the tools, strategies, and established methods for efficiently managing your AWS expenses while sustaining performance. Furthermore, we will explore how AWS Managed Services can help expedite the adoption of cost optimization best practices and strategies using native AWS tools within your AWS accounts.

AWS Cost Optimization Services

AWS recognizes the critical importance of cost optimization for its customers navigating the cloud landscape. To empower businesses to effectively manage and control their cloud spending, AWS has developed a comprehensive suite of services and tools that provide valuable capabilities for monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing AWS expenditures. The journey to cost optimization begins with gaining visibility into cloud costs through the AWS Cost and Usage Report, which enables customers to understand their AWS costs with granular details, including usage, pricing, and metadata. Complementing this, the AWS Cost Explorer helps you find cost optimizations based on recommendations such as AWS Reserved Instances or AWS Savings Plans, serving as a powerful magnifying glass for analyzing AWS bills, providing interactive charts, graphs, and pre-configured reports that help users visualize and analyze their costs over time, uncovering insights to identify cost-saving opportunities.

Beyond these foundational tools, AWS offers additional services that drive cost optimization, such as AWS Budgets for custom cost and usage thresholds and alerts, the AWS Trusted Advisor for real-time guidance on identifying cost optimization opportunities, and the AWS Compute Optimizer, which uses machine learning to recommend optimal AWS resource configurations, potentially reducing costs by up to 25% while improving workload performance. AWS also provides storage-focused cost optimization solutions, including Amazon S3 analytics and Amazon S3 Storage Lens, which offer automated analysis and visualization of storage patterns to deliver insights and recommendations for optimizing cost-efficiency. Underpinning these cost optimization services is the AWS CloudWatch platform, which enables comprehensive visibility and empowers users to identify underutilized resources, automate responses to performance changes, and fine-tune resource allocation to drive cost optimization.

Leveraging AMS to Enhance Cost Efficiency

While AWS offers valuable cost optimization tools like Trusted Advisor and Compute Optimizer, implementing their recommendations can be challenging for customers with limited resources or expertise. This is where AWS Managed Services (AMS) Accelerate steps in to provide a comprehensive solution.

As an AWS service dedicated to managing and operating cloud environments, AMS goes beyond traditional operational capabilities to prioritize cost optimization. By handling the heavy lifting of operational activities, AMS frees up your team to focus on your core business. With AMS, you gain access to a suite of capabilities including proactive monitoring, patching, automation, and expert recommendations.

This holistic approach from AMS ensures that you are continuously monitoring and optimizing your AWS investment from a cost perspective. The “Learn” component of the cloud optimization flywheel (refer. Figure 1) is supported by AMS’s deep expertise and best practices, allowing you to gain insights into your cloud usage and costs. AMS’s comprehensive monitoring and reporting capabilities provide the “Measure” aspect, giving you visibility into resource utilization and spending. Finally, the “Improve” stage is facilitated by AMS’s proactive optimization recommendations and automated actions, helping you continuously optimize your cloud environment and reduce unnecessary expenses. To further enhance this process, AMS Accelerate designates a Cloud Service Delivery Manager (CSDM) and a Cloud Architect (CA) to partner with your organization. These experts drive operational and security excellence, ensuring that cost optimization strategies align seamlessly with your business objectives and technical requirements. Here’s how AMS takes cost optimization to the next level:

Figure 1: Cloud Optimization Flywheel

Optimizing Costs with AWS Trusted Advisor Recommendations: AWS Trusted Advisor is a powerful tool that continuously evaluates your AWS environment against best practices and provides actionable recommendations to optimize costs, improve fault tolerance, enhance performance, strengthen security, and manage service limits. When it comes to cost optimization, Trusted Advisor identifies opportunities for savings, such as identifying idle resources, unused Elastic IP addresses, and underutilized instances. While Trusted Advisor’s insights can be invaluable, implementing these recommendations can present challenges for some customers. Understanding the nuances of the findings, determining suitable remediation strategies, and automating the optimization of a large number of resources may require specialized expertise and resources.

This is where the AWS Managed Services (AMS) team can provide a comprehensive solution. AMS brings together a trifecta of capabilities – people, processes, and technology – to help customers seamlessly implement Trusted Advisor’s cost optimization recommendations. (refer. Figure 2).

Figure 2: AMS automation trifecta

We’ll now focus on how AMS provides immediate cost-savings through automated implementation of AWS Trusted Advisor cost-optimization findings on behalf of the customers.

1. People – Expert Guidance:
   The AMS team comprises seasoned professionals with deep expertise in AWS services. These experts work closely with customers to understand their unique requirements and align Trusted Advisor’s recommendations with their business goals. Their hands-on experience and knowledge ensure that cost optimization strategies are not only implemented effectively but also tailored to the specific needs of each customer.
2. Process – Strategic Integration:
   AMS follows a systematic approach to implementing Trusted Advisor recommendations. This process involves assessment, planning, and execution through AMS’s Operations On Demand (OOD) offering, ensuring that every cost-saving measure is seamlessly integrated into the existing environment. From identifying and decommissioning idle resources to optimizing instance types, AMS leverages best practices to drive efficiency.
3. Tools and Automation:
   1. Trusted Remediator – Automated Remediation: Trusted Remediator is an AWS Managed Services solution that automates the remediation of AWS Trusted Advisor checks. Trusted Remediator creates recommendations when Trusted Advisor checks indicate opportunities for you to reduce costs, improve system availability, optimize performance, or close security gaps for your AWS accounts. With Trusted Remediator, you can address these security, performance, cost optimization, fault tolerance, and service limit recommendations in a safe, standardized way that uses established best practices. Trusted Remediator allows you to configure a remediation solution and runs automatically on a schedule that you create, simplifying the remediation process. This streamlined approach addresses issues consistently, efficiently, and without manual intervention.
   2. Optimization through Additional Insights: AMS goes beyond Trusted Advisor’s recommendations by leveraging additional metrics and tools to enhance the implementation process. Automated monitoring, resource management, and real-time insights enable organizations to track the impact of cost optimization measures. For example, when implementing Trusted Advisor’s recommendation for right-sizing EC2 instances, AMS introduces memory utilization metrics through Amazon CloudWatch, providing a more comprehensive view of resource utilization and enabling more informed optimization decisions.
   3. Resource Scheduler: AMS Resource Scheduler offers cost reduction by automatically stopping unused resources and starting them when necessary. By implementing schedules, such as stopping instances outside of business hours, the solution optimizes instance utilization and reduces overall costs. It allows you to schedule the start and stop of Auto Scaling groups, Amazon EC2 instances, and Amazon RDS instances, effectively managing infrastructure costs where resources don’t need to run continuously. This solution, built on AWS Instance Scheduler, provides additional features and customization tailored to AMS customer needs, including support for multiple patching maintenance windows, a cost savings estimator, and operational support from AMS. Schedules and periods define resource runtime (refer. Figure 3), and AWS resource tags associate schedules with targeted resources. By utilizing these features, businesses can achieve significant cost savings and track them using the cost estimator feature.

      Figure 3: Example of AWS Managed Services’s Automation document

      By combining expert guidance, strategic processes, and additional optimization insights, AMS helps customers overcome the challenges of implementing Trusted Advisor’s cost optimization recommendations, ensuring that organizations can maximize their cost savings and drive greater efficiency in their AWS environments.

   4. Dedicated guidance for AWS-powered Solutions: Your CSDM and CA provide guidance during and after configuration and onboarding to AMS Accelerate. They deliver monthly reports of your operational metrics, and work with you to identify potential cost savings using tools such as AWS Cost Explorer, Compute Optimizer, and Cost and Usage Reports (refer. Figure 4).
      AMS also maintains a library of solutions that help customers achieve outcomes using AWS tooling referred to as AMS Patterns. This collection encompasses various categories, with cost optimization standing out as a pivotal focus, which includes:
      • Disk usage reporting – The disk usage reporting pattern collects consumption space of volumes across multiple app accounts and present result as a centralized report in Amazon S3 with Athena table querying capability. It provides insights into account volumes’ actual usage to determine cost saving opportunities.
      • Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshot deletion – Automation based on Lambda and CloudWatch Events automates deletion of Amazon EBS snapshots taken outside of AWS Backup, based on retention periods. It helps purge individual snapshots taken outside of AWS Backup, saving added cost over time.

      

      Figure 4: Example tooling AMS leverages for various categories

Conclusion

In today’s dynamic business landscape, cost optimization is a critical imperative for organizations navigating the cloud. Fortunately, AWS provides a comprehensive suite of services to help enterprises effectively manage and reduce their cloud expenditures. However, implementing these solutions and driving ongoing cost optimization can present challenges, particularly for teams facing skill gaps or competing priorities. This is where AWS Managed Services (AMS) steps in as a trusted partner, offering a proven path for organizations striving to improve operational efficiency and cut costs. AMS brings together the people, processes, and technology required to support customers at every step of their cloud optimization journey.

With AMS’s deep expertise and best practices, organizations can confidently navigate their cloud transformation, embracing the benefits of a more efficient, cost-effective, and agile infrastructure. AMS not only helps reduce operational risks, but also ensures workloads remain available and resilient. FieldCore’s success story, as a customer partnering with AMS to save costs and drive innovation through automation, demonstrates the transformative impact AMS can have on an organization’s cloud journey.
To unlock the full potential of your cloud investments and embark on a path to sustainable cost savings, explore how AWS Managed Services can support your cloud operations and optimization efforts. Visit the AMS page or request a demo to see the service in action and discover the power of expert guidance, proven processes, and advanced tools to optimize your cloud costs and unlock new opportunities for growth.

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