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Your organization weighed the options, ran the numbers, took a deep breath, and migrated to the cloud. That’s a perfectly solid strategic move—but your monthly invoices aren’t quite as lean as your original business case predicted. What’s worse, they are actually larger than your prior costs and increasing! This, unfortunately, is not uncommon. However, you can manage your resources with smart cost optimization techniques to shrink those bills. 

Optimizing your costs–regardless of the cloud provider–takes some work. In this course, you'll discover methods and tools on AWS to optimize cloud costs, including best practices for efficiency, cost transparency, and automation. 

You'll gain a comprehensive grasp of cloud economics, cost considerations, and a practical toolbox for streamlining AWS workloads with reduced manual effort. By implementing some strategies in this course, you will significantly reduce the chances of ever getting that surprise AWS invoice again!

AWS Cost Optimization

Elastic file storage with Intelligent-Tiering

We have been asked by a client to architect a cost-effective landscape consisting of 10 nginx web servers serving up approximately 500 GB of static PDF documents. Which choice would be the most cost-effective way to provide an NFS share to a fleet of EC2 web servers where roughly 70% of the data is rarely accessed?

We have been asked by a client to architect a cost-effective landscape consisting of 10 nginx web servers serving up approximately 500 GB of static PDF documents. Which choice would be the most cost-effective way to provide an NFS share to a fleet of EC2 web servers where roughly 70% of the data is rarely accessed?

On AWS, which family will usually offer the best on-demand cost efficiency for a fleet of nginx web servers?  (**Hint:** nginx is available for ARM64 architectures.)

On AWS, which family will usually offer the best on-demand cost efficiency for a fleet of nginx web servers? (Hint: nginx is available for ARM64 architectures.)

No, because we are only supposed to give the customer exactly what they asked for originally.

Yes, rather than a fleet of 10 web servers, opt for one R6i.2xlarge instance and deploy Apache rather than nginx. Attach an S3 bucket via FUSE to serve as the local storage for the PDF files.

Yes, move the PDF files and associated HTML files to an S3 bucket. Enable static hosting on the bucket and deploy CloudFront in front of the S3-based website.

No, a fleet of web servers and local-attached storage is the most robust way to host this data, as it provides fault-tolerance and redundancy.

Yes, we could instead use G4dn instances and use the on-board GPUs to implement an HTTP/2 compression to reduce the size of the outbound data.

Consider our client's request for hosting 500 GB of static PDF documents.
As a consultant, on customer's request, will you have any other ideas for an architecture that is more cost-effective? 
(**Hint:** See Q1 of this *quiz*.)

Consider our client’s request for hosting 500 GB of static PDF documents.
As a consultant, on customer’s request, will you have any other ideas for an architecture that is more cost-effective?
(Hint: See Q1 of this quiz.)

Configure the session manager to allow us to log into the instance remotely and use ```top``` to monitor memory usage, recording the values every 5 minutes for 24 hours.

Install the CloudWatch Agent and setup memory utilization monitoring for the instance within the CloudWatch console.

Set up memory utilization monitoring for the instance within the CloudWatch console and set an alert when memory utilization reaches 80%.

Given the existing tools available on AWS, we will not be able to monitor memory utilization at the OS level on a Linux-based system.

We need to evaluate the memory utilization of one of our Ubuntu Linux EC2 servers to determine if we can downsize it to a smaller instance with less memory. What will be the best course of action?

We need to evaluate the memory utilization of one of our Ubuntu Linux EC2 servers to determine if we can downsize it to a smaller instance with less memory. What will be the best course of action?

They are inherently unstable, which is why they cost less than an equivalent M, R or, C instance families.

They are only available with the ARM64 architecture, and only a few applications are available for that architecture.

If launched with default settings, they can cost up to 1.5 times more than an equivalent M-class instance.

They only accumulate credits for burst performance when they are in a stopped state.

Why can T3 and T4 burstable instance types be tricky to use cost-effectively?

Why can T3 and T4 burstable instance types be tricky to use cost-effectively?

Test your knowledge of the topics covered in this chapter.

Introduction

The Economics of Cloud Computing

The AWS Cost Optimization Pillar

Rightsizing

Elasticity

Pick the Right Pricing Model

Measure, Monitor, Improve

More Ways to Save

Wrap Up and Keeping Current

You Make The (Cost Optimization) Call!

Quiz: Right-Sizing