How did we achieve a 0.5 million $ reduction
in cloud costs?
This time We will share How we reduced cloud costs by 0.5 million $ a year. This case is a bit different from the others since it involves a change of configuration from the company.
Background:
The organization operates a Connectivity Platform, using cellular bonding and dynamic encoding. The platform is already deployed and in use by several customers.
The organization’s main services are EC2 running on-demand.
So, what did we do?
Since spot instances were not an option for them, a solution out of the box was needed. In this case, it was initiated by the company side.
To make a long story short, they put their customers' servers in their customers' clouds, instead of those servers deploying in the company’s cloud.
The outcome was a massive reduction in the number of servers the company uses.
Now it was our time to attribute to the company's effort to reduce cloud costs and we did it by these methods:
EC2 Rightsizing - We did downsize to EC2 instances with a low CPU utilization, and a low use of memory (Requires shutdown of the instances).
EC2 Stopped Instances - When working with EC2 you pay for every hour the instance is on (on demand), so when you switch the instance off you don’t pay. However, you are still paying for the Volumes attached to the instances and for the IPs.
EBS Outdated snapshots - old snapshots that are no longer needed. It is very important that when applying backups policies, you also define the time limit for saving the snapshots!
EBS Generation Upgrade - We updated the generation type to a newer version with better performance and lower energy consumption (for example- from GP2 to GP3). In the EBS upgrade, there is no downtime!
EC2 Generation Upgrade - We updated the generation type to a newer version with better performance and lower energy consumption (from t2 to t3).
NAT Gateway Idle - There were several NAT Gateways underutilized.
We’re still not done and monthly costs are still dropping by 10%-20% every month. The plan is to finish all those procedures and buy SP/RI.
For now, the monthly costs dropped from $50K to $10K and there is still work to be done, An impressive 80% reduction, and at least half a million $.
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