The Importance of right-sizing and other effective strategies

Read on Beehiiv | June 27, 2024

Welcome to The Cloud Economist!

Last week I summarized some articles and tips on using tagging on your cloud resources to help you reduce costs in a creative way. I also mentioned how AWS Compute Optimizer can be used to optimize workloads for costs and performance.

If you missed that you can read it here.

In the question of the week, I asked how can your Lambda functions end up costing you 2-3x if they are not properly configured

The answer to this is about Lambda Auto-retries. By default, Lambda functions auto-retry on error up to 3 times. If your functions run into errors and auto-retry, this could end up costing you a lot at scale - up to 3 times the expected cost.

In this week’s edition let’s take a look at how right-sizing can work wonders in terms of cost efficiency and help us save our money.

Here are the best articles I’ve found on cloud cost savings this week, summarized.

What Is AWS Sizing? 10+ Best Practices And Tips by Cody Slingerland.

Right-sizing involves strategically configuring your cloud resources to match your workload needs, optimizing performance, and minimizing costs.

Right-sizing is one of the most effective elements of reducing costs in the cloud. Don’t neglect it.

This article shares 10 tips to save money by right-sizing:

1. Use a cloud intelligence solution (like CloudZero)

2. Review your AWS performance data

3. Identify and note down your usage needs

4. Identify and remove idle resources

5. Maintain continuous AWS sizing

6. Use AWS Auto Scaling (features/ ASGgroups)

7. Migrate between instance families

8. Use reserved instances, spot instances and savings plans

9. Leverage AWS sizing tools (e.g. Trusted Advisor, CloudWatch)

10. Maintain an analytics framework after Right-sizing

Right-Sizing AWS Instances for Optimal Performance and Cost by Fredrik Filipsson

This article discusses some strategies of right-sizing AWS workloads and the cost benefits of right-sizing:

• Regularly monitor and analyze resource utilization with AWS CloudWatch and Cost Explorer to detect underutilized resources.

• Use AWS Auto Scaling for dynamic resource adjustments based on demand.

• Leverage AWS Compute Optimizer for automated right-sizing recommendations.

• Conduct regular resource audits to eliminate unused or idle resources.

• Optimize instance types by selecting the right instance families based on workload needs.

• Apply cost allocation tags to better track and manage resource costs. 

• Automate the right-sizing process using AWS tools like Lambda and Systems Manager to ensure continuous optimization with minimal manual intervention.

One Tip on Cloud Cost Savings

Use cost intelligence platforms to monitor and optimize costs.

Platforms like CloudZero provides detailed insights into your AWS spending, allowing you to see costs broken down by service, team, project, feature, and even individual customers. This granular visibility helps identify specific areas for optimization.

This Week’s Question

What methods would you use to identify and eliminate zombie resources that might be inflating your cloud bill?

You can answer this by replying directly to this email or wait for next week for the official answer!

Until next week.

The Cloud Economist

Uriel Bitton