How we reduced AWS monthly cost from over $50K a month to under $18K a month!
After merger with another company, we inherited AWS accounts that were costing the company over $50K per month. We followed the following steps:
Started by reviewing the monthly bills and identifying the source of the charges.
Evaluated the services billed in each AWS region.
Removed any deployed resources that were not being used: e.g. unattached Elastic IPs, unattached EBS, VPCs with their attached resources without any running services on them,…
Removed any unused test and development instances and services.
Started providing other teams about what each infrastructures cost to have more visibility to underlying costs of running our platforms.
Once unnecessary components were removed, considered migrating services from older, more expensive AWS services (like EC2) to more cost-effective and modern options (such as serverless services). In this specific case, we migrated micro service API servers and an Airflow cluster off from a Kubernetes cluster running with KOPS on EC2s. We migrated these services to AWS App Runner and MWAA.
Started questioning ourselves and internal users the necessity of running expensive services. For instance, we had a large cluster of EC2 instances on peered VPCs which originally deployed to serve thousands of customers for our finance team. However at the time, there were fewer than 200 customers using it, while the infrastructure was costing us more than $6K per month. Eventually, the finance department dealing with these customers convinced to incentivize and convinces customers to close their accounts before their remaining term of 18 months. We were then able to shut down that costly infrastructure.
Followed best AWS practices on deployed and newly deploying services in order to optimize our services in terms of cost, security, and performance. For example, we enforced idle shutdown policies on our Sagemaker instances, resulting in savings of over $2K per month.
Once our account was optimized to the best of our expertise, we engaged our AWS account manager to have their cost-saving experts assess our infrastructure. They provided us with more cost saving tips such as utilizing reserved instances. This service is free of charge and highly beneficial.
Repeated all of the above steps again when possible.
The results were remarkable:
AWS bills dropped from over $50K a month to under $18K a month.
We brought awareness to the waste culture of the organization. We were able to build a culture that everyone was responsible for cost optimization and cost reduction.