AWS Cost Management
Cost Management has always been an important part of managing any IT infrastructure. This has been especially true when using Cloud Providers as costs, without proper checks and warnings in place, can grow quickly. Instances, Backups or other resources that get created and forgotten, or large instances or a large number of instances only intended for short use get forgotten and not shut down and the costs pile up.
ReInvent Key Notes
Cloud Providers therefore have a large incentive to provide great tooling to warn against and inspect rising costs. Especially in recent years when costs have become a much more important factor for many companies and industries their management has been an important focus for AWS. 2023 ReInvent Key Notes were heavily cost focused with new releases making cost analysis and optimization easier than ever before.
The importance of notification mechanisms
But to start with the obvious basics having proper Budgets and Alerts in place for your accounts is the first step that should be implemented. A robust notification mechanism and alerts on various levels of spending are key to making sure runaway costs will be caught early. The alerts on multiple levels are especially important so costs don’t just trigger one notification or email but will trigger notifications multiple times if they increase quickly. This is not theoretical by the way but learned through long customer experience. Alerts based on actual spend and forecasts are a good mix to make sure anything is caught early. Anomaly detection for costs is an additional tool to help you find any surprising cost increases early.
Once you’ve set up this basic safety net the next step can be evaluating and analyzing existing costs to optimize your system. We’ll explore those in future blogposts.
If you have any questions, our experts are happy to help you!
