- The Cloud Economist
- Posts
- Welcome to The Cloud Economist!
Read on Beehiiv | June 27, 2024
Welcome to The Cloud Economist!
This is the very first edition, so thank you for being here.
The beginning of something new is always exciting. Akin to a first development project or even a new love.
I’m as excited (probably more than you) to launch a brand new newsletter and offer curated content on the best cloud computing has to offer.
Here’s The Scoop
Every Sunday I’ll share the best curated articles I found on saving costs in the cloud.
I’ll follow it up with a tip on building applications with the cloud.
And I’ll wrap up with a question for you (and answer it the following week).
I realized that finding and sifting through valuable articles and blogs online takes a lot of time - time you don’t have.
So instead of spending your lunch break (or bathroom breaks at work) searching for this content, you’ll receive the most valuable articles/blog posts summarized right to your inbox along with a tip and a question.
So without further ado, let’s start the first edition with what you came here for!
Here are the best articles I’ve found on cloud cost savings this week, summarized.
Summary
Serverless applications can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership by shifting operational responsibilities to the cloud provider, potentially saving up to 57% compared to traditional server-based models.
To optimize AWS Lambda costs, focus on configuring memory allocation appropriately, as Lambda charges are based on memory size, execution duration, and the number of invocations.
Techniques such as using AWS Lambda Power Tuning and Compute Optimizer can help determine the optimal memory settings for balancing performance and cost.
Use ARM architecture with Graviton processors for better performance at lower costs, filter incoming events to reduce unnecessary function calls, and avoid recursive Lambda function invocations.
Setting appropriate timeouts and leveraging proper event filtering, contribute to reducing Lambda costs and improving overall efficiency in serverless applications.
Summary
AWS offers several cost-saving strategies, including discounted pricing models like Spot Instances, Reserved Instances, and Savings Plans, which provide significant discounts for long-term commitments or using spare capacity.
Best practices for optimizing costs include
stopping or downsizing underutilized EC2 instances
deleting unattached EBS volumes
leveraging S3 storage tiering
optimizing EC2 autoscaling groups
selling underutilized RIs
monitoring DynamoDB usage.
Additionally, tools like Spot by NetApp can help automate and enhance these savings by optimizing the use of Spot Instances and other pricing models while maintaining performance and reliability.
One Tip on Cloud Cost Savings
Stop paying for idle EC2 instances and RDS instances. Terminate EC2 and RDS instances that are idle over the weekend/holidays/nights and reprovision them at the start of the week/morning.
This will lead to significant cost savings - both in the short and long term.
This Week’s Question
How can you automate the termination and recreation of EC2 instances on a schedule - for example having them automatically deleted and created every weekend - to save big on costs?
You can reply with your answer and I’ll answer it next week.
Until next week.
The Cloud Economist