AWS Cost Optimization Checklist
Tags: aws, cloudcostmanagement, spotinstances, reservedinstances
Published: 2020-03-03 06:46:54

---
title: AWS Cost Optimization Checklist
published: True
description: Want to cut down on the costs of maintaining your cloud services? Here's a list of things you need to make sure when running your AWS architecture.
tags: AWS, Cloud Cost Management, Spot Instances, Reserved Instances
---
![Thumbnail](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/9y7ypo0ruj1tk8ftxbwn.png)

Are you sure you're following all of the practices and strategies to optimize your expenses? AWS has many flexible methods of keeping your expenditure to a minimum but the myriad of services and strategies could overwhelm you. Check out the list of essential strategies below to see if you've got all your bases covered.

<h4>Instances</h4>

<ul>
<li>Purchase instances that suit your organizational needs.</li>
<li>Buy reserved instances with appropriate duration. Don't reserve instances long-term if you won't need them.</li>
<li>Analyze the pricing history of the Spot market at least a week before purchase to know which instances are worth purchasing.</li>
<li>Purchase Spot Instances for resources that aren't set up for production.</li>
<li>Deploy some Spot instance tools so you don't have to worry about your instances being interrupted.</li>
<li>Monitor your instances monthly. Purchase the latest instances.</li>
</ul>

<h4>Scheduling</h4>

<ul>
<li>Schedule your instances. Keep them running only on business hours.</li>
<li>Make use of AWS instance scheduler or third-party automatic <a href="https://www.totalcloud.io/resource-scheduling?utm_source=Dev-to&utm_medium=dist&utm_campaign=Cost-Checklist">scheduling tools</a> to take the task off your hands.</li>
<li>Try to be even more thorough with the scheduling times. If you don't need instances to be running during certain working hours(like lunchtime), then turn it off.</li>
<li>Schedule your resources based on their activity. Don't need to keep them running if they are idle.</li>
<li>Shut down resources other than instances like unused DB volumes or elastic IPs based on time or activity.</li>
</ul>

<h4>Storage</h4>

<ul>
<li>Optimizing your storage directly results in the optimization of your costs.
Store your running resources on S3 and move them between tiers according to their activity.</li>
<li>Set up a lifecycle policy</li>
<li>Use S3 Intelligent-tiering for moving between frequent and infrequent access tiers automatically.</li>
<li>Archive your less active resources on Glacier.</li>
<li>Archive data backups long-term on Glacier Deep Archive.</li>
<li>Backup large volumes of data on Elastic Block Storage. Store your EC2 instances or clusters on here.</li>
<li>Applications with high workloads can be run on Amazon EFS as it provides auto-scaling and quick outputs.</li>
<li>Delete old snapshots and unallocated disk volumes</li>
<li>Delete unnecessary objects and buckets</li>
<li>Make use of AWS auto-scaling to allocate the sufficient capacity of storage to the workload</li>
<li>Choose open-source operating systems</li>
</ul>

<h4>AWS Cost Management Tools</h4>

<ul>
<li>Analyze your expenses with Cost and Usage report.</li>
<li>Use Trusted Advisor to see your expense forecast.</li>
<li>Figure out unused resources with Trusted Advisor.</li>
<li>Keep up with the trends in the market with AWS Cost Explorer</li>
<li>Create budget plans for your resources</li>
<li>Aggregate the expenses by services you run</li>
<li>The individual employees of your organization with cost optimization tools</li>
</ul>