Unlocking Advanced AWS Cost Optimization With Trusted Advisor

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a range of tools to help users manage their resources effectively, ensuring they are secure, well-performing, and cost-optimized. One such tool is AWS Trusted Advisor, an application that inspects your AWS environment and provides real-time recommendations in various categories, including cost optimization. While many AWS customers are familiar with the essential cost-saving tips Trusted Advisor provides, a wealth of more profound insights and advanced strategies can be leveraged for even more significant savings. 

This blog will explore some of these advanced tactics to help you maximize your AWS investment.

Understanding AWS Trusted Advisor

Before delving into the advanced cost optimization strategies, let’s quickly review what AWS Trusted Advisor does. It analyzes your AWS environment using a set of checks and provides recommendations to help you follow AWS best practices.

What Trusted Advisor Offers

Trusted Advisor offers recommendations across five categories:

• Cost optimization: Identifying underutilized resources and opportunities to reduce your spend.
• Performance: Suggestions to improve the speed and responsiveness of your applications.
• Security: Highlight potential security gaps and provide best practices for securing your AWS resources.
• Fault tolerance: Ensuring your application is resilient and has appropriate backup measures.
• Service limits: Check if you’re close to exceeding your service limits.

Within these categories, the focus of this blog is to dive into cost optimization and explore how to go beyond the essential advice.

Going Beyond Basic Cost-Saving Measures

While Trusted Advisor provides straightforward advice, such as shutting down idle instances or deleting unattached EBS volumes, many other opportunities for cost optimization can be explored.

Utilize Cost Allocation Tags

Implementing and Managing Tags

Cost allocation tags can transform how you track your AWS spend. By tagging resources, these tags allow you to assign costs to specific projects, departments, or environments. Once implemented, you can run detailed reports that provide insights into where your money is going, allowing for more targeted cost-saving strategies. 

Advanced Tagging Strategies

Go beyond just tagging by environment or project. Implement more granular tags, such as cost centers, specific users, or types of usage (e.g., development, testing, production). This detailed tagging enables precise tracking and accountability, leading to more sophisticated budgeting and forecasting.

Right-Sizing Resources

Analyzing Usage Patterns

Trusted Advisor will point out underutilized resources, but it's up to you to analyze usage patterns over time to determine the right size for your resources. Use AWS CloudWatch to track metrics and usage over extended periods to make informed decisions about sizing.

Adopting Elasticity

Consider implementing auto-scaling or using serverless architectures like AWS Lambda, where you only pay for what you utilize. These services can automatically adjust to your application’s needs, ensuring you are not settling for unused capacity.

Reserved and Spot Instances

Strategic Purchasing

Purchasing Reserved Instances (RIs) or using Spot Instances for specific workloads can offer significant savings over on-demand pricing. However, the trick lies in identifying which workloads suit these purchasing options. For instance, workloads with predictable usage patterns are ideal candidates for RIs.

Spot Instance Best Practices

Spot Instances can be purchased at a significant discount, but they come with the risk of being outbid. Use them for stateless, fault-tolerant applications or workloads that can tolerate interruptions, such as batch processing jobs.

Storage Optimization

Cleaning up Redundant Data

Regularly review and delete old snapshots and unused volumes. Trusted Advisors can point out unattached volumes, but only you can decide when a snapshot is no longer necessary.

Intelligent Tiering

Use S3 Intelligent Tiering for data with unknown or changing access patterns. It automatically moves your data to the most cost-effective access tier without performance impact or operational overhead. 

Use of AWS Budgets and Cost Explorer

Budgets for Cost Control

AWS Budgets can set custom cost and usage budgets that alert you when you're about to exceed your budgeted amount. This proactive measure can prevent unexpected costs.

Deep Dive With Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer allows for a more detailed analysis of your spending patterns. You can visualize AWS spending and usage trends and pinpoint areas for potential savings.

Leverage Automation for Cost Savings

Automation Scripts and Tools

Write automation scripts to start and stop instances, create and delete snapshots, and manage other resources based on usage patterns. Use AWS Lambda functions triggered by CloudWatch Events to automate these tasks.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Use IaC tools such as AWS CloudFormation or Terraform to manage infrastructure, ensuring that only the required resources are provisioned and any unused resources are de-provisioned automatically.

Continuous Optimization: A Cost-Saving Philosophy

Embrace a Culture of Cost Awareness

Foster an organizational culture where cost-efficiency is a priority. Encourage teams to monitor and optimize their use of AWS resources continuously.

Regular Review of Trusted Advisor Recommendations

Make it a practice to review and act upon Trusted Advisor recommendations regularly. Continuous improvement is critical to maintaining cost efficiency.

FAQs

How Does AWS Trusted Advisor Differ From AWS Cost Explorer?

AWS Trusted Advisor and AWS Cost Explorer serve complementary functions in managing AWS costs. Trusted Advisor provides real-time guidance across various categories, including cost optimization, by offering specific recommendations on reducing costs and improving efficiency. It focuses on resource usage and service configurations to identify opportunities for savings.

On the other hand, AWS Cost Explorer is a tool specifically designed for visualizing and analyzing your AWS spend. It allows you to view historical data, forecast future costs, and understand your cost drivers at a granular level. Cost Explorer gives you the data analysis capability to make informed decisions about your AWS spending.

Is AWS Trusted Advisor Free, or Does It Come With Additional Costs?

AWS Trusted Advisor offers a set of basic checks available to all AWS users at no extra charge. These include several cost optimization, best practices, and service limit checks. However, you need a subscription to AWS Business or Enterprise Support plans to access detailed checks and recommendations across cost optimization, security, fault tolerance, and performance. These plans provide a more comprehensive analysis and benefit larger or more complex AWS environments. 

Conclusion

Cost optimization on AWS is an ongoing process, not a one-time setup. By leveraging the advanced strategies provided by AWS Trusted Advisor and complementing them with your own continuous review and optimization efforts, you can significantly reduce your AWS bill while maintaining high performance and reliability.