Leveraging AWS Data to Manage Spend and Allocate Costs

Scott WardSolutions ArchitectAmazon Web Services

Aaron NewmanCTO/FounderCloudCheckr

Reserved Instances

Pricing Models on AWS

On-Demand

Pay for compute capacity by the hour

For spiky workloads, or to define needs

Reserved

Use No Upfront, Partial, or All Upfront payment options to receive a significant discount on the hourly charge

For committed utilization

Spot

Bid for unused capacity, charged at a Spot Price which fluctuates based on supply and demand

For time-insensitive or transient workloads

Dedicated

Launch instances within Amazon VPC that run on hardware dedicated to a single customer

For highly sensitive or compliance related workloads

Free Tier

Get Started on AWS with free usage & no commitment

For POCs and getting started

Why Reserved Instances?

Scaling out- Ensure that capacity you need to support your applications is there when you need

to scale out.

Failing over- Ensure that the capacity you need to support your applications is there when you

need to fail over from your primary architecture.

Steady state- You have a good understanding on your long term compute needs to commit to the

appropriate resources in exchange for reduced cost.

Reserved Instance Payment OptionsNo Upfront – 1 year term only- Obtain reserved instance capacity with no upfront payments- Discounted hourly rate for duration of term- Up to 50% off compared to on-demand

Partial Upfront – 1 or 3 year term- Balances payments between upfront and hourly- Pay some money upfront and then pay low hourly rate for the rest of the term- Up to 74% off compared to on-demand

All Upfront – 1 or 3 year term- Pay all up front and no hourly fees- Up to 75% off compared to on-demand

Reserved Instance Benefits

Capacity is reserved- Confidence that instances can be launched when you need them

Discounts over on-demand workloads- Up to 75% over on-demand- Greater discounts on Reserved Instance Marketplace

Flexibility to modify Reserved Instance configuration based on current needs

Share pricing benefits, but not capacity reservation, among linked accounts

Resell unused/unwanted capacity in Reserved Instance Marketplace

Resource Tagging

What is resource tagging?

• Ability to add custom metadata to your AWS resources• Allows you to categorize your AWS resources

– Purpose– Owner– Environment– Project– Cost Center– Etc

Why is tagging important?

• Tool to organize resources for your customers– Especially if you have customers with multiple linked accounts

• Run reports on specific tags across multiple accounts• Use tags to control access to AWS resources• Track project resources for a customer• Track utilization across cost center• Enhanced search capabilities• Greater level of information in the detailed billing report

Uses for Tagging

• Searching for resources in the Management Console and APIs• Grouping matching tags across AWS resources into Resource

Groups– Allows you to view details about all resources at once.– Track resources tied to a particular project

• Detailed billing information– Detailed Billing Report– Cost Explorer

• Controlling access policies based on tags– Enhance IAM access policies to be fine grained

Billing Alerts

Billing Alerts

• Allow you to be notified when your estimated monthly spend reaches a certain amount.

• Define alerts for your overall estimated charges or for specific services.

AWS at Leading Image Content Company

Current• In use for many years, but with no centralized standards, insight or focus (many

accounts came from different subsidiaries and/or companies we acquired)• Some very large projects • ~30 accounts to date

Future• New projects appear about once or twice a month

Implementing CloudCheckr

History• CloudCheckr brought in for evaluation in summer ’14• Became corporate standard in Dec ‘14• Account collection into AWS Master Billing• CloudCheckr began in November ‘14 through April ’15

Focus• Reduce cost• Increase visibility• Centralize and standardize analytics

CloudCheckr Strategy (so far…)

We’ll discuss each of these in the next few slides

• Understand and reduce cost and utilization across enterprise

• Leverage Best Practice reports to optimize usage

• Support charge-backs within projects and customer base

Identify Cost/Usage Across the Enterprise

• Identified all AWS accountsMoved to Consolidated Billing and monitor using

CloudCheckr

• Understand overall spendWho’s spending what and where in one report

• Understand usage

Number of resources used Identify defunct resources and accounts What’s stored in S3 today

Utilize Best Practices to Optimize Usage

Best Practice Cost

• Identified $38k/year in immediate cost savings (new generation instances)

• Identified another potential $20k/year in potential savings (under-utilized instances)

• Identified ~$10k/year in a few accounts of accounts that were deprecated (they were cancelled)

Migrate Previous Generation Instances

How much can you save?http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/previous-generation/

Examples:m1.large : vCPU:2 / ECU:4 / Memory(GiB) 7.5 / 2 x 420 $0.175

per Hourm3.large : vCPU:2 / ECU:6.5 / Memory(GiB) 7.5 / 1 x 32 SSD $0.133

per Hour

24% savings - Do you need the extra storage? What about m4?

Support Charge-backs Within ProjectsAWS accounts that "host" small projects that don’t want to be bothered by infrastructure costs and support

• Using tags on AWS resources• Run custom cost reports to charge back costs based on tags

AWS accounts that support paid customer access (in progress)• Using tags on AWS resources• Manually invoicing right now after running a report similar to

above• Planning to leverage CloudCheckr invoicing

CloudCheckr:Making AWS Cost Management Easy

Building a Tagging Strategy

Determine the Tags you want- E.g. Department, Owner, ProductLine, Expiration

Define your Tagging Rules- https://app.cloudcheckr.com/#Report/ImproperlyTaggedResources

Monitoring for Improperly Tagged Resources- Check daily or push emails- Terminate instances that violate your policy

Creating Advanced Budget Alerts- Enhances the Billing Alarms in CloudWatch - Build budget alerts from tags, project times, multiple thresholds, etc…

Best Practice Checks350+ Best Practice Checks around Cost, Security, Availability, Usage

- Complete integration with Trusted Advisor

Identifying Unused Reserved InstancesFor EC2, RDS, Redshift, and ElastiCache

Drilling down into more detailsBest practice checks drilldown into complete details, history, etc…

Rebalancing Reserved InstancesAdjust your Reserved Instances to best utilize what you have running

Modify the instance type and Availability Zone from the Console

- http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-modifying.html

Thank You for Attending

Sign up today for free evaluation

at http://cloudcheckr.com

Aaron Newman is the Founder

of CloudCheckr (www.cloudcheckr.com)

Please contact me with additional questions at:

aaron.newman@cloudcheckr.com