How to optimize AWS costs? Practical tips from Welastic

Using Amazon Web Services (AWS) can greatly increase the flexibility and scalability of your IT operations, but it can just as easily lead to unexpectedly high costs if not managed properly. In this blog post, thanks to the expertise of the Welastic team, we present proven methods for reducing your AWS expenses that will help you achieve maximum performance at minimum cost.

1. Accurate monitoring and analysis of usage

Start by establishing close monitoring of AWS resources, using tools such as AWS Cost Explorer. This will help you understand where and how resources are being spent, and identify areas where costs can be optimized.

2. Serverless computing

Serverless computing on AWS is not only Lambda, but also other services that allow you to execute code without managing the server infrastructure. This includes Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), which is a container management service that allows you to run applications in containers without managing servers.

• AWS Lambda:
  • Flexibility: Automatically scales to handle the number of requests.
  • Cost management: You pay only for the time a function is executed, with billing for every 100 ms.
• Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service):
• Fargate: Run containers without managing servers or clusters. You pay for the actual computing time and memory used by the containers.
• Scalability: ECS supports automatic scaling, adjusting the number of container jobs according to changing workload requirements.
• Integration with other AWS services: Easily connect to services such as Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon VPC and AWS IAM for end-to-end control and security.

3. Network Security

Applying appropriate network security can significantly reduce unnecessary network traffic and associated costs.

• Security groups: Configure security groups to filter traffic at the instance level.
• ACLs (Access Control Lists): Enable traffic filtering at the subnet level.
• AWS WAF: Application-level HTTP/S traffic filtering can block unwanted requests, reducing load and costs.

4. Scalability

AWS offers multiple scaling solutions that can be customized as needed.

• Auto Scaling: automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances in response to current load demands.
• Elastic Load Balancing (ELB): Evenly distributes traffic between EC2 instances, increasing application performance and availability.

5. EC2 Rental Options

AWS EC2 offers various pricing models that can help optimize costs.

• On-Demand: Payment by the hour or second (depending on the instance), with no long-term commitment.
• Reserved Instances: Contracts for 1 or 3 years, offering significant discounts in exchange for a commitment to use a specific configuration.
• Spot Instances: The ability to use redundant AWS computing power at significantly lower prices.
• Savings Plans: Flexible plans that offer lower rates in exchange for a commitment to a specific usage (per hour) for 1 or 3 years.

6. Always Free Tier

AWS also offers a Free Tier, which allows users to use free resources to learn how to use AWS. This is a great option for new users or small projects.

• Lambda: 1 million free calls per month.
• DynamoDB: 25 GB of storage.
• Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service): Users can use SQS at no additional cost for up to 1 million requests per month, allowing you to manage communications between different application components in a reliable and scalable way.

Using these practices, you can not only optimize costs, but also increase the efficiency and scalability of your applications on the AWS platform. Regularly reviewing and adjusting your configuration will help you maintain optimal costs with changing business and technology requirements.