Scenario

You've recently been contracted by a small legal firm, ABC, to help lower their AWS bill on an AWS landscape that was set up by an external consultant. The first thing you notice is that all their EC2 instances are running On Demand. When you inquire as to why they haven't used any optimized pricing plans, they say this was just how the original consultant set everything up.

A quick call to the consultant, who still remotely supports the law firm's apps, revealed that they don't know much about AWS and were unaware of other potentially less costly pricing options. They said we are welcome to change over to other types of pricing plans, so long as it does not require any rearchitecting.

The law firm is also open to saving money through different purchase models, but cash flow is tight, and they need to pay as they go without any upfront payments.

Using the AWS Pricing Calculator (https://calculator.aws/), price out a more cost-optimized version using some strategies learned in this chapter. After you’ve done your best, reveal the hints below to compare your solution with what we came up with.

Here are some clarifications and constraints:

  • For the sake of simplicity, we are not including network charges—just compute and storage. Additionally, assume all servers are running Linux.

  • AWS pricing occasionally changes, so our point-in-time figures might not match yours perfectly. The strategies we employ are more important.

  • Although AWS recommends a Business or Enterprise support plan for organizations, this company is living dangerously without a support plan. (Just for simplicity's sake.)

Current Region: us-west-2

Current Monthly Bill: $2,529.25 USD

Total 12 Month Cost (Estimated): $30,351.05 USD

Total 36 Month Cost (Estimated):  $91,053.15 USD

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