Review, Refine, Repeat

The real key to attaining a truly optimized AWS landscape is consistency and a desire for continuous improvement.

💡Pro Tip: The real key to attaining a truly optimized anything is consistency and a desire for continuous improvement!

We cannot overemphasize this enough; this is or will be the most challenging task for many organizations. People will come and go, IT landscapes will evolve, priorities will change, and those who can do something consistently will reach excellence. This is harder than it seems, as we all know. Think about those personal vows to change your lifestyle in some way that are entirely abandoned after just a few weeks. With cost optimization on AWS, some things should become part of an organization's normal operating process. We’ll go into those things and the tools that AWS offers us later. For now, we just want to touch on what the AWS Cost Pillar documentation suggests.

Effective governance

It had to appear somewhere in this course: governance. Governance is one of those words that probably conjures images of bureaucracy, glacial slowness, and organizational paralysis. Yes, it can be those things when done poorly, but it can also be a massive source of empowerment. Let's look at the example of driving on the roadways.

Most places have governance that requires automotive drivers to follow certain rules, like which side of the road to drive on, what to do at intersections, and what safety measures should be observed. Because of this governance, we can have some expectation that other people will also follow the same governance, and together, we'll all get to where we want to go following those norms.