AWS Cost Management Tracking, Allocating and Controlling Spend in the

AWS Environment with CloudCheckr

Welcome

Maya Cabassi

Partner Marketing Manager

Amazon Web Services

Webinar Overview

Submit Your Questions using the Q&A tool.

A copy of today’s presentation will be made available on:

AWS SlideShare Channel@ http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/

AWS Webinar Channel on YouTube@ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT-

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Kyle Lichtenberg Solutions Architect

Amazon Web Services

Aaron Newman Founder

CloudCheckr Inc.

Introducing

J.B Krewson Dir. Technical Operation

DreamBox Learning

Intro to Amazon Web Services and Cost Management

Overview of CloudCheckr cost optimization tools for AWS

Case study: how DreamBox Learning reduced spend by nearly 30%

Q&A

What We’ll Cover

One of the primary reason

businesses are moving so quickly

to AWS and the cloud is

increased agility.

Enterprises Can’t Afford to be Slow

Add New Dev Environment

Add New Prod Environment

Add New Environment in APAC

Add 1,000 Servers

Remove 1,000 Servers

Deploy 1 PB Data Warehouse

Shut down 1 PB Data Warehouse

AWS:

Infrastructure in Minutes Old World:

Infrastructure in Weeks

Global Services

* China (Beijing) Region-

EC2 Availability Zones: 1 Coming Soon

10 Regions*

26 Availability Zones*

51 Edge Locations

A Culture of Innovation

On-Premises

Experiment Infrequently

Failure is expensive

Less Innovation

Experiment Often

Fail quickly at a low cost

More Innovation

Cost Savings and

Flexibility

Source: IDC Whitepaper,

sponsored by Amazon, “The

Business Value of Amazon Web

Services Accelerates Over Time.”

December 2013

1

“Average of 400 servers

replaced per customer”

Replace up-front

capital expense with

low variable cost

2

42 Price

Reductions

Economies of scale

allow AWS to continually

lower costs

4

Save more money as

you grow bigger

Tiered Pricing

Volume Discounts

Custom Pricing

3

Pricing model choice

to support variable &

stable workloads

On-Demand

Reserved

Spot

Dedicated

How can you achieve lower TCO with AWS?

Pricing Models on AWS

On-Demand

Pay for compute capacity

by the hour with no long-

term commitments

For spiky workloads,

or to define needs

Reserved

Make a low, one-time

payment and 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

AWS Cost Management Tracking, Allocating, and Collaborating

Spend in the AWS Environment

Aaron C. Newman

Founder, CloudCheckr

Aaron.Newman@CloudCheckr.com

Reserved Usage Best Practices

• Different type, regions, sizes, time frames

• All offer different ROIs

• Calculate Return on Investment

• Total Savings / Upfront cost

• ROI highly dependent on your usage

• How many hours, transactions, requests, etc…

Use EC2 spot instances when possible

Different Strategies for Buying RIs

• Analyze Usage by Instance

• Look at how many hours each instance is running

• Analyze Usage by Frequency

• Look at number of hours running by hour and instance type

• Track your expected usage

• Use tagging strategies

• How likely to keep running an instance?

• Can you reassign unused Reserved Instances?

Types of Reserved Usage

EC2 Reserve Instances Most commonly used, a lot of factors to understand

RDS Reserved DB Instance Often a better option for purchase, database are more stable

ElastiCache Reserved Nodes https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/pricing

DynamoDB Reserved Capacity https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/pricing

CloudFront Reserved Capacity Pricing https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing

Best Practices for Resource Utilization

• Locate and eliminate idle resources

• Right-size resources • Don’t under or over-utilize

• Use Auto Scaling Groups • Design your applications

• to scale up and down

Check on ALL your resources:

EC2, EBS, ELBs, RDS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, etc…

Build a Tagging Strategies

• Tag your resources so you can allocate costs

• Tie costs to applications and resource owners

• Provides visibility into what you are spending

• Identify and classify costs

• So that you can reduce them

• Locate and eliminate untagged resources

You can’t optimize what you can’t measure

Use Consolidated Billing

• Create a master payer account • Link all your accounts from there

Advantages includes:

• A single view on all costs

• Reserved Instance usage • works across consolidated accounts

• Pricing tiers are compressed

• Overall reduced bill

DreamBox Learning

• DreamBox Learning© is an online elementary math

program that raises student performance and

confidence

• DreamBox combines engaging, adaptive lessons with

the up-to-date reporting educators need to individualize

instruction

• Our software and our company are based on agility:

rapid adaptation and improvement. We need the same

qualities in our infrastructure

AWS gives us the agility and services we need, but managing

and optimizing choices can be tricky

Online Math Education

How We Use AWS

• Diverse services • S3, EC2, RDS, ElastiCache, CloudFront, Route53, others

• Heavy use of auto- and scheduled scaling

• Always adding, changing components

• Multiple complex pre-production environments

• Our challenge: • Use the right resource for every need

• Eliminate cost surprises

• Reduce staff time needed to track costs

What We Need To Know

• Are we using Reserved Instances effectively?

– How to spot opportunities to sell RIs?

– How to buy exactly the right type and count of RIs?

• Where are costs increasing too fast?

– Which services’ costs increase faster than traffic?

• Where should we be looking for savings?

– Better to save 5% off $100, than 50% of a dime.

How CloudCheckr Helped

• Are we using Reserved Instances effectively?

– “Best Practices” cost report

• Where are costs increasing too fast?

– Daily and Weekly reports that highlight big increases

• Where should we be looking for savings?

– “Top 10 most expensive” report

– “Resource Utilization” reports

– AWS Billing drill-down tool

What We’ve Learned

• Use the right type of instance: – OK if it is interrupted? Not time critical? USE SPOTS

– Running all the time, can’t be interrupted? USE HEAVY RIs

– Running 2/3 of the time, can’t be interrupted? USE LIGHT RIs

– Runs less than 2/3 of the time, can’t be interrupted? DEMAND

• Not all RIs are equal: – EC2 reservations can be modified and resold. We are

aggressive in buying these

– RDS and ElastiCache reservations are a firm commitment. We are much more cautious about buying these

• Stay on top of storage, particularly AMIs and Snapshots

Sep-13 Oct-13 Nov-13 Dec-13 Jan-14 Feb-14

EC2 Demand

EC2 RI

EC2 Other

RDS

OTHER

Traffic

CloudCheckr Cost Control Impact

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Costs DROP while load increases

Contacts and Q&A

CloudCheckr: Sign up for a free evaluation at: App.cloudcheckr.com

CloudCheckr Contact: Aaron Newman aaron.newman@cloudcheckr.com AWS Contact: aws.amazon.com/contact-us