Cloud Life’s Three Step Approach to Cost Savings

Cloud Life Consulting has been a leader in saving customer’s money on their AWS accounts since 2014. Throughout the years, we've learned the most effective approaches to optimize costs, the best places to look for savings, and the culture required to maintain a low-cost infrastructure. Our refined three-step process, combined with a focus on automation and process improvements, ensures ongoing optimization of AWS resources.

Just like security, AWS cost savings should not be a one-time project. It's crucial to incorporate cost savings into infrastructure planning from the proof of concept (POC) stage through production implementation. If you only think about cost savings sporadically, you risk losing the context of who built which resource and its ultimate use and creating waste between cost savings measures.

The quickest way to save money on day one is by removing any unnecessary items from your AWS account. Some unutilized resources that should be removed include unattached EBS volumes, unallocated Elastic IPs, and old EBS snapshots. It's also crucial to set appropriate retention settings for resources such as AWS CloudWatch Logs and ensure that S3 buckets have lifecycle policies that align with your company's data retention policies.

Automating this process is critical to maintaining a clean AWS account. Cloud Life Consulting utilizes tools like Steampipe and Cloud Custodian to identify resources needing optimization. Integrating these tools into an automation platform allows us to build an efficient AWS management process that consistently eliminates waste.

Ensuring that resources are right-sized is the next step in optimizing costs. For resources that will be around for a long time, covering them under reserved instances is essential, and automating this process is also crucial for maintaining constant coverage and optimization.

By leveraging an automated process, Cloud Life Consulting has helped clients generate savings upwards of 30-40% through right-sizing and utilizing reserved instances.

The most involved step in our cost-saving approach is reviewing the architecture to ensure the correct systems are used for each workload. For example, choosing between a NoSQL and relational databases can significantly impact costs. Our three-step process allows us to gain context about a customer's account, understand the core components and resources, and how they all work together. This knowledge not only helps us identify unutilized resources but also enables us to develop a comprehensive cost optimization plan that utilizes the most cost-effective and performant solutions.

Rather than merely providing recommendations, our goal is to work closely with clients to build an actionable plan for cost optimization. If desired, we can also assist in implementing the strategy to ensure clients achieve the maximum possible savings.

By incorporating cost savings into the planning and implementation process, organizations can avoid common issues such as losing context about their infrastructure and accumulating waste over time. This ongoing focus on cost savings ensures organizations can maintain a clean and efficient AWS environment.

To help clients maintain cost-saving practices long-term, Cloud Life has developed a service called Cloud Covered. This service supports customers throughout all three steps of the cost savings approach, ensuring that their AWS environments remain optimized over time.

Cloud Life Consulting's proven three-step process to cost savings in AWS accounts has consistently delivered impressive results. Our approach helps clients achieve significant savings while maintaining a clean and efficient AWS environment by focusing on automation and continuous process improvement. With the support of our Cloud Covered service, we ensure that clients can maintain their cost-saving practices long-term.