The cloud can dramatically lower your infrastructure costs when compared to a traditional data center.

That statement is true, yet I constantly have clients that tell me they pay more with AWS than they were previously.

There can be many reasons why this happens. For example the creation of a highly scalable, highly available web site requires the use of more services (EC2, RDS and ELB), whereas previously everything would have run from one VM in your traditional data center.

Or perhaps you need to meet a compliance standard such as HIPAA. Consquently you need to implement a robust monitoring, logging and auditing solution that wasn’t an option in your previous environment. These additional services add cost to your monthly bill.

Probably the single largest cause of runaway costs is due to the key feature of the cloud – the ability to launch infrastructure on demand.

The days of having to be frugal with your resources are gone. Spending hours in budget meetings fighting to get approval for some new instances or extra storage are a distant memory. And subsequently this increased freedom causes a “kid in a candy store” type mentality.

It’s very easy to lose control of your environment if it isn’t managed correctly. It’s not difficult to find yourself with soaring costs and resources all over the place with no real understanding of what is being used and by whom.

However, it doesn’t have to be that way. At databasable takes cloud optimization very seriously and so does AWS. In fact, Cost Optimization is one of the five pillars of the AWS Well Architected framework that all AWS certified professionals need to know.

We regularly perform reviews on our clients AWS infrastructure and typically we can reduce monthly costs by 10-30%. In some cases this has resulted in six-figure annual savings.

Here are the main areas that we look at to perform AWS cost optimization:

• Resource usage – It’s amazing how many resources are just sitting there that are not required anymore. We identify them and get rid of them, either for good or temporarily.
  
• Rightsizing – If a resource is in use and is required, we verify that they are sized correctly and not costing more than they need to. No need to pay for that expensive eight CPUs when you only need two.
  
• Discounts – AWS offers several ways to reduce the costs of your infrastructure with one or three year commitments. We analyze the best mix of these to save you money.
  
• Re-architecture – This is where our extensive AWS knowledge comes into play. We examine your existing environments and optimize it for both cost and performance, often leading to massive savings and vastly improved end products.

So what are you waiting for? Let databasable review your environment and potentially save you thousands of dollars.