The Fundamentals

The majority of Amazon’s services work on a pay-as-you-go model with billing depending on how much time was spent on their services and with what resources.  All points of cost are completely transparent, leaving no extraneous costs to suddenly catch users completely off guard.  Licensing and complex contracts are not necessary either, allowing the user to dive right into using the services of their choice.  When the user is done using the service, they may terminate at any time without additional charges applied.

No Overprovisioning

One of the bigger challenges is over-provisioning resources that will remain unused for some time.  Even when the maximum capacity is met, there is still a chance that the additional resources that are procured to continue meeting demand will also go unused and result in more wasted funds.  AWS’ payment model updates with more current needs as resources can be added seamlessly through the cloud.  Amazon’s cloud lets its users be as flexible as their customers require.

Savings Plans

Savings Plans is a flexible pricing model for discounted service use.  It offers savings in exchange for the dedicated use of a service for a specific amount of time over the course of a 1 or 3 year period.  This comes with recommendations, performance reporting, and budget alerts.

More is Less

AWS also offers volume-based discounts with higher resource use accounting for greater discounts.  Some services have tiered pricing where the more resources users consume, the less they have to pay per GB.  This is applied to either storage use or the frequency at which a service is used.  This way, as a company either grows in scale or needs to cope with spikes in customer activity, Amazon helps to alleviate the burden of expanding costs.

Free Trial

For those uncertain about using AWS, there is a free trial mode for certain services on offer referred to as Free Tier.  How much is available to use differs on the service type as well as different periods of time allotted to users.  Free Tier services are either offered for the first year after signup, a few months after initial activation, or are perpetually free for a certain amount before actual funding kicks in for additional resources.  We have an article covering the AWS Free Tier with more details on what services are available and for how long.

The Fundamentals

The majority of Amazon’s services work on a pay-as-you-go model with billing depending on how much time was spent on their services and with what resources.  All points of cost are completely transparent, leaving no extraneous costs to suddenly catch users completely off guard.  Licensing and complex contracts are not necessary either, allowing the user to dive right into using the services of their choice.  When the user is done using the service, they may terminate at any time without additional charges applied.

No Overprovisioning

One of the bigger challenges is over-provisioning resources that will remain unused for some time.  Even when the maximum capacity is met, there is still a chance that the additional resources that are procured to continue meeting demand will also go unused and result in more wasted funds.  AWS’ payment model updates with more current needs as resources can be added seamlessly through the cloud.  Amazon’s cloud lets its users be as flexible as their customers require.

Savings Plans

Savings Plans is a flexible pricing model for discounted service use.  It offers savings in exchange for the dedicated use of a service for a specific amount of time over the course of a 1 or 3 year period.  This comes with recommendations, performance reporting, and budget alerts.

More is Less

AWS also offers volume-based discounts with higher resource use accounting for greater discounts.  Some services have tiered pricing where the more resources users consume, the less they have to pay per GB.  This is applied to either storage use or the frequency at which a service is used.  This way, as a company either grows in scale or needs to cope with spikes in customer activity, Amazon helps to alleviate the burden of expanding costs.

Free Trial

For those uncertain about using AWS, there is a free trial mode for certain services on offer referred to as Free Tier.  How much is available to use differs on the service type as well as different periods of time allotted to users.  Free Tier services are either offered for the first year after signup, a few months after initial activation, or are perpetually free for a certain amount before actual funding kicks in for additional resources.  We have an article covering the Free Tier here with more details on what services are available and for how long.

Tools to Help

Visualization

To better understand how to organize the resources provided, there are visualization tools for analyzing resource expenditures with links back to specific points where those resources were expended.  These spreadsheets can further be tailored to better suit specific departments in an organization that need specific pieces of information provided in a way that’s easier for them to understand and apply.  This is more helpful for allocating respective costs instead of having resource expenditure under a singular variable with no context as to what the contributing factors to certain price hikes are.

Better Cost Control

The name of the game is still allowing management to have better access to billing information.  Along with oversight as to which customers are spending what company resources, upper management has the final say on what guardrails are in place to avoid overspending.  This control also extends to governance and security functionality with controls for permissions and access logs.

Planning and Forecasting

Amazon has invested heavily in AI technologies and applies that heavily in how they save costs with AWS.  On the cloud, it is much easier to procure and deactivate resources based on rising needs without the need to physically install more resources.  This does require organizations on the cloud to physically prepare for having to adopt new methods of anticipating changes in the budget.  For example, traffic on a seasonal basis is something that can be predicted and can be built around.  This way, it is easier to interpret a bill as either having crossed the payment threshold or having remained within budgetary constraints.

Existing Price Models

AWS does have sets of pricing models with pre-established variables to meet both physical requirements and pricing goals.  These models can be further adjusted and altered based on customer needs.  There are plenty of components to change including the operating systems, instance types, availability zones, and purchase options.  AWS pricing recommendations can further assist users further tailor what resources they need based on resource usage patterns to better drive down costs without compromising performance.

Pricing Calculator

To avoid being as esoteric as possible, there is a calculator on the AWS website to help predict the cost of using a service.  The pricing is very transparent as to what will cost however much and it is fairly easy to use.  It can take into consideration the use of multiple services and provide estimated results with individual costs of services kept separate for ease of use.  Calculated results are also easy to share with others by providing either a link to the results or exporting the results in the form of a .csv file.  As stated before, the calculator is on Amazon’s own website and is available to use free of charge to understand the cost before dedicating anything towards AWS.  Alternatively, there are also whitepapers, tutorial videos, and presentations that Amazon provides which all cover cost optimization on AWS here.

Tools to Help

Visualization

To better understand how to organize the resources provided, there are visualization tools for analyzing resource expenditures with links back to specific points where those resources were expended.  These spreadsheets can further be tailored to better suit specific departments in an organization that need specific pieces of information provided in a way that’s easier for them to understand and apply.  This is more helpful for allocating respective costs instead of having resource expenditure under a singular variable with no context as to what the contributing factors to certain price hikes are.

Better Cost Control

The name of the game is still allowing management to have better access to billing information.  Along with oversight as to which customers are spending what company resources, upper management has the final say on what guardrails are in place to avoid overspending.  This control also extends to governance and security functionality with controls for permissions and access logs.

Planning and Forecasting

Amazon has invested heavily in AI technologies and applies that heavily in how they save costs with AWS.  On the cloud, it is much easier to procure and deactivate resources based on rising needs without the need to physically install more resources.  This does require organizations on the cloud to physically prepare for having to adopt new methods of anticipating changes in the budget.  For example, traffic on a seasonal basis is something that can be predicted and can be built around.  This way, it is easier to interpret a bill as either having crossed the payment threshold or having remained within budgetary constraints.

Existing Price Models

AWS does have sets of pricing models with pre-established variables to meet both physical requirements and pricing goals.  These models can be further adjusted and altered based on customer needs.  There are plenty of components to change including the operating systems, instance types, availability zones, and purchase options.  AWS pricing recommendations can further assist users further tailor what resources they need based on resource usage patterns to better drive down costs without compromising performance.

Pricing Calculator

To avoid being as esoteric as possible, there is a calculator on the AWS website to help predict the cost of using a service.  The pricing is very transparent as to what will cost however much and it is fairly easy to use.  It can take into consideration the use of multiple services and provide estimated results with individual costs of services kept separate for ease of use.  Calculated results are also easy to share with others by providing either a link to the results or exporting the results in the form of a .csv file.  As stated before, the calculator is on Amazon’s own website and is available to use free of charge to understand the cost before dedicating anything towards AWS.  Alternatively, there are also whitepapers, tutorial videos, and presentations that Amazon provides which all cover cost optimization on AWS here.