Spend Smarter, Save More: CloudThat’s Automated Approach to Cost Reduction

Introduction

AWS’s diverse services and price options allow you to achieve your desired performance and capacity. Businesses choose AWS cloud computing for scalability or security. AWS cloud computing has also emerged as one of the most recent technological developments businesses are adopting. One of the enticing features of AWS is its “pay as you go” pricing model.

While AWS has several advantages over traditional on-premises infrastructures, its flexibility and scalability can result in out-of-control expenditures. The expenses of AWS might be hazy and difficult to assess. Without devoted resources to identify the source of expenses and how to control them, your profit margins will swiftly erode.

Automating Cloud Cost Monitoring and Optimization for Enterprises

Enterprises frequently complain that they are overpaying on the cloud, that a significant portion of their budget is squandered on underutilized services, or that millions of businesses are providing resources with more capacity than they require.

Businesses aren’t always to blame for not lowering AWS costs. Pricing on AWS is tough to assess. Cloud bills are likely to surpass expectations if cloud clients feel they are only paying for what they use rather than what they receive.

The Cost Control Revolution: How CloudThat Automated Spending Tracking Ahead of AWS

Today we will discuss the automation that CloudThat had done even before AWS introduced similar native services for tracking spending.

1. CloudThat team has created a serverless solution using Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, and Amazon API Gateway for a unified dashboard to visualize the cost utilization of all the accounts simultaneously. Amazon S3 is used for hosting the frontend dashboard, and AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway are used for fetching all the resources running in AWS accounts. Several teams are performing POCs and utilizing AWS accounts and tend to forget to delete the resources after the work is completed. So, we have created an automation that runs daily after business hours to terminate all the resources running in the AWS account. Through this automation, we have seen significant reduced costs in AWS accounts.

2. Since CloudThat is a leading pioneer AWS training provider, numerous external participants will perform hands-on labs for specific training. And CloudThat team is used to create Users and manually share the credentials with the participants. As the number of participants grows, this manual process has become an operational burden, and CloudThat came up with Voucher Management. The participants will generate vouchers for the training, and the credentials will be generated by redeeming the vouchers. The voucher comes with an expiry period where users will be automatically deleted after the expiry period. This simplified the process of User Management for external users. The whole solution is serverless.
3. Even though the external users are deleted, it becomes a problem to track the resources created by the external users and manually delete them. It is time-consuming and difficult to go through individual services in all regions of the AWS account. So, we have created a deletion automation script by attaching appropriate tagging to the resources while creating, and the resource was deleted by identifying using the user tags.
4. So many of our customers are leveraging the dashboard solution to optimize their complex multiple AWS accounts environment costs.

CloudThat’s Assessments

Often customers come to us to optimize their cloud spending, saying that they are receiving very high costs and cannot control them, and it is becoming difficult to monitor their costs.

CloudThat team evaluates scenarios where most of the costs go unnoticed and recommends optimization accordingly. Below are the points that are assessed:

1. CloudThat team reviews the entire AWS environment using Cost Explorer and finds daily costs incurred.
2. CloudThat setups the AWS Budgets so that the concerned personnel will be notified when costs exceed the budget set by defining thresholds.
3. CloudThat monitors resource utilization using metrics and recommends the ideal solution that optimizes the cost of the resources.
4. Compute Optimizer is further used for additional recommendations for underutilized or overutilized resources and provides the best optimization approach for the workloads.
5. CloudThat suggests using Reserved Instances and Savings plans to reduce costs by up to 40% for long-term usage.
6. CloudThat team helps set up scalable solutions to handle peak workloads for specific periods instead of using oversized resources that will be mostly idle most of the time. This helped improve and simplify operations and reduce costs by up to 30%.
7. Serverless solutions are utilized for less processing workloads and event-based workloads to save costs.
8. Appropriate cost allocation tags are used to monitor the costs incurred and periodically review the usage based on the budgets set.
9. Cost and usage reports are set up and generated for individual resources concerned with high costs and reviewed accordingly.

Conclusion

CloudThat is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner that can help businesses implement Cost effective solutions. CloudThat provides consulting, implementation, training, and managed services to help businesses design, implement, and manage a proper architecture to leverage AWS services. By working with CloudThat, businesses can ensure that their systems are less costly and more impactful with high availability and scalability.

About CloudThat

CloudThat is an official AWS (Amazon Web Services) Advanced Consulting Partner and Training partner and Microsoft Gold Partner, helping people develop knowledge of the cloud and help their businesses aim for higher goals using best-in-industry cloud computing practices and expertise. We are on a mission to build a robust cloud computing ecosystem by disseminating knowledge on technological intricacies within the cloud space. Our blogs, webinars, case studies, and white papers enable all the stakeholders in the cloud computing sphere.

Drop a query if you have any questions regarding Cost Optimization, I will get back to you quickly.

To get started, go through our Consultancy page and Managed Services Package, CloudThat’s offerings.