The majority of companies have recognized the importance of the cloud and led them to choose different cloud service providers like AWS ( Amazon Web Services) to increase utilization rates.  It has the ability to grow and expand IT resources without capital investment.

AWS offers an array of services for many kinds of development requirements.  Cost-effectiveness is the primary objective of the AWS cloud provider. Many organizations are dealing with issues like overuse, unused capacity, suboptimal application placement.

These issues can be brought down only by the rise of AWS billing for businesses. Because the companies need to pay only for the resources they require and use.

Here are the best ways to reduce the AWS bill for your business.

Identify Changes to Cost When They Happen

By identifying the changes happening with your resources, you have a chance to reduce the cost of the bill at the end of the month. We know that companies move IT infrastructure to the AWS cloud because of the reduced costs for the support, increased potential to scale your infrastructure and enhanced connectivity to other cloud-based services. You can do AWS tagging to your projects as a better practice.

Tag resources by the associated application, sponsor the owner to a large scale project. Once you set the tags properly use the cost explorer to view and arrange the costs from highest to lowest. The additional tools will help you to analyze the changes to the infrastructure compared to last month.

Shutdown Unused AWS Resources

At the end of each working day, the development environments have to shutdown unused instances as a part of cost optimization.

The services like AWS OpsWorks (a configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef and Puppet) and  AWS Elastic Beanstalk (an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services developed with different programming languages and familiar servers such as Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS) allows developers to deploy and redeploy applications. Using AWS CloudFormation the developers can easily create the AWS resource templates.

Use the Appropriate Storage Class

Use the Amazon S3 object storage to know why and when to use the five tiers to optimize the costs. For optimizing the cost of your data storage it’s important to move the data from S3 to IA after 30 days and after 90 days archive the data to Glacier. There should be a delete policy to expire the data after 180 days.

• Standard: It is for frequent access data on a variety of use cases. Each month, customers are provided with 5 GB of Amazon S3 storage, 20,000 Get Requests, 2,000 Put Requests, and 15 GB of data transfer.
• Standard-Infrequent Access: It is for data that is used less frequently. It requires the same resilience but can be retrieved rapidly when needed. You are charged a retrieval fee of $0.01 per GB if S3-IA pricing is lower than the standard S3 tier.
• One Zone-Infrequent Access: It is similar to S3-IA and less expensive since the data is only stored in a single availability zone with less resilience. To store secondary backups we can use One-Zone IA.
• Glacier: Glacier is durable as Standard S3. It is designed for data that is retained for more than 90 days. But it takes 3–5 hours with standard retrieval to restore data.

Select the Right Instance Type

Make sure that you are using the best instance that fits your application workload and is cost-effective. While you minimize the spending, you can maximize the workloads by considering the required factors like type of processing unit and amount of memory.

The cost of the running system can be monitored in real-time by tagging the instances. Amazon Cloudwatch and Trusted Advisor are the tools used to access your instance metrics. It is a helpful service to automatically react to changes in your resources.

In the case of Reserved Instances, Amazon RDS, DynamoDB, Redshift and ElastiCache are other services where you can take advantage of reserved capacity at a lower cost.

At reduced rates and certain conditions, Spot Instances permits AWS to allocate their unused capacity to users. If a system contains containerized systems like Docker, stateless web servers or Big Data systems, then Spot Instances help to reduce your overall costs. The price for Spot Instances varies on the basis of current demand.

Use Auto Scaling

To handle sudden traffic spikes you can use Auto Scaling which monitors your applications and automatically adjusts the capacity to maintain steady. It is the process of adding resources when they are required and turn off when they are not needed.

The Auto Scaling is not just used for cost management, it also detects when an instance is harmful and terminate it to relaunch a new version. The best resources for automated scanning solutions are CI/CD and test environments.

Your organization may have EC2 and RDS instances, these services only need access during the business hours. Auto Scaling can be used to automate start and stop EC2 and RDS instances.

To fully minimize the costs, you should use Auto Scaling, Spot Instances, and Reserved Instances.

Consolidated Billing

Consolidated Billing enables you to see a combined view of all your AWS charges across your multiple accounts. One of your accounts is placed as the master and charges from each account can be easily tracked. The service is available at no charge. You need to monitor regularly to reduce cloud cost. The amount of time you invest for regular cost monitoring will depend on AWS spending and the size of the organization.

The main variables to be used for determining the savings are:

• Cost Saving Potential — Maximum gains for a cost-saving action
• Complexity — How hard it is to implement the work and effort required
• Owner — Who will perform the action

Delete Unattached EBS Volumes

In a situation when the user terminated an EC2 instance and forgets to delete the EBS volume which was associated with that instance. As a result, that particular EBS volume still remains functional and racks up the cloud expenditure.

The EC2 instance is common for accounts, so it will not automatically delete EBS volumes. Finding and deleting unattached volumes reduces spending.

By logging into your AWS account and viewing the EC2 dashboard you can view the number of EBS volumes you have in use. The EBS provides storage space for EC2 instances. The benefit is you can detach the storage volume and attach it to a new instance if required.

If you no longer need an Amazon EBS volume you can delete it. These processes confirm that the volumes have no activity for a determined period before they’re deleted.  You can delete the EBS volume using the console and command line.

Conclusion

So, here you got the idea of how to effectively use the services to reduce the AWS bill.

Some of the above methods can be implemented within a few minutes while others take some research and planning. To reduce the AWS bill you need to work hard and you need a regular routine to monitor your expenses, determine your priorities for cost-saving.

By using these tools and services correctly, AWS can drastically change your economic model and receive the financial benefits of cloud computing.