Cost Optimization Best Practices - AWS Well-Architected Framework Study Guide
Published: 2022-03-02 20:47:55

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[**Practice Cloud Financial Management**](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/framework/cost-cfm.html)
- Implement organizational wide knowledge building, programs, resources, and processes
- Align your organization to an agreed set of financial objectives, and provide your organization the mechanisms to meet them
- Improve or build on existing programs and processes
- Use team members and supplement the team with experts in CFM and cost optimization
- Consider including people with supplementary or specialist skill sets, such as analytics and project management
- Ask:
     - How do you implement cloud financial management?

[**Expenditure and usage awareness**](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/framework/cost-aware.html)
- Attribute resource costs to the individual organization or product owners
- Use resource tagging to apply business and organization information to your usage and cost
- Use AWS Cost Explorer for visibility into your cost and usage, or create customized dashboards and analytics with Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight
- Ensure you use the right level of detail and granularity in cost and usage reporting and monitoring
- Set up billing alerts to notify you of predicted overspending
- Ask:
     - How do you govern usage?
     - How do you monitor usage and cost?
     - How do you decommission resources?

[**Cost-effective resources**](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/framework/cost-cereso.html)
- Use managed services to reduce costs
- Make use of On-Demand Instances, Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, and Spot Instances
- Ask:
     - How do you evaluate cost when you select services?
     - How do you meet cost targets when you select resource type, size and number?
     - How do you use pricing models to reduce cost?
     - How do you plan for data transfer charges?

[**Manage demand and supply resources**](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/framework/cost-mandem.html)
- Supply resources to match the workload demand at the time they’re needed
- Modify the demand, using a throttle, buﬀer, or queue to smooth the demand and serve it with less resources
- Use Auto Scaling with demand or time-based approaches to add and remove resources as needed
- Actively think about the patterns of usage, the time it takes to provision new resources, and the predictability of the demand pattern
- Ask:
     - How do you manage demand, and supply resources?

[**Optimize over time**](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/framework/cost-opti.html)
- Review your existing architectural decisions to ensure they continue to be the most cost effective
- Be aggressive in decommissioning resources, entire services, and systems that you no longer require
- Replace or add new components to the workload with new services
- Ask:
     - How do you evaluate new services?


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