What we did to reduce our customers' AWS costs by more than 50%.
Do you believe it's impossible to reduce AWS consumption by more than half? Here's how we did it.
The First Meeting
One of our customers came to our website while looking for methods to save AWS expenses. Since They thought it would be easier, they decided to schedule a consultation.
We performed a preliminary assessment at that moment. We discovered that the company website was hosted on an AWS account. The monthly cost was around USD 110,000 and was steadily rising. The customer desired a cost of roughly USD 75,000. This was far too costly for the service provided. As a result, we took on the task of optimizing it.
We walked the customer through the AWS Management Console during the first session. We set up a Read-Only Access to the AWS account, which gave us access to the billing data and service configurations.
The Assessment
Our team finished the account assessment, and we emailed a report which revealed:
● The primary reason for the high expenses
● AWS account optimization steps (without affecting the service).
● Expected savings
Our findings were discussed with our customer. And it was decided to go through with the optimization. It would have no impact on customer traffic. However, we constantly take extra precautions. And then put the modifications in place during the maintenance windows.
Making the necessary improvements
We requested a maintenance window and shared the screen during these sessions. We used the remote control to optimize the situation. Advantages of this method include-
● Before we made the changes, we explained what we were doing.
● The stages were understood and agreed upon by the consumer.
● The process was then taught to the consumer.
● Other configuration-related questions were also answered.
Following that, we looked at the application and its AWS usage pattern. During this process, we looked over the bill to see where it could be improved. The customer requested a 30% cost reduction which we were able to deliver. However, with our skillset we were able to further reduce the cost to 50%.
Further assessments revealed that there is a space for infrastructure improvement as well. We discussed this with the customer and made the following infrastructure improvements:
i. Reduced size based on usage requirements for application
ii. Scheduled routine downtime for developer boxes
iii. Suggested improvements in application
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iv. Resized database correctly
v. Reviewed EBS and EFS volumes to implement according to application requirements
vi. Cleaned up unused EC2 instances that were set up manually
vii. Moved 100% infrastructure management to terraform with proper Gitlow pipeline
After all of this, the monthly bill, which was initially USD 110000, dropped to USD 56000, a reduction of more than 50%.
Conclusions
To summarize, the following are some of our findings.
1) Significant cost savings are possible.
In this scenario, we were able to save more than half of the costs. Many people feel that optimization leads to little cost savings (5% or 10% ). However, in most cases, cost reductions up to 35% are possible.
2) All of the savings were due to a single sort of adjustment.
There are numerous cost-cutting solutions available. However, completing all of them is difficult. As a result, we concentrate on taking small measures that have the most impact. We just performed one type of change in this situation.
3)You do not have to reduce your capacity.
You always pay for what you use on the cloud. You will pay less if you minimize your resources. The aim is to make optimum use of resources while avoiding capacity loss.
4) Recurring savings are only possible with a single optimization.
The optimization is performed only once. The changes will continue. As a result, you'll be able to save money every month in the future.
Will you accept the challenge of optimizing?
It's your time now. Make an appointment for a consultation and begin optimizing with Grupdev!!