AWS Optimization: The Basics and 15 Ways to Optimize Your Cloud

What Is AWS Cloud Optimization? 

AWS optimization refers to the process of optimizing and improving the performance, reliability, and cost-effectiveness of workloads and resources running on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform. This includes optimizing various aspects of AWS services and resources, such as compute, storage, networking, databases, and more.

AWS optimization is an ongoing process that involves continually evaluating and fine-tuning the use of AWS services to ensure optimal performance and cost-effectiveness. It can help organizations improve their AWS usage, reduce costs, and improve service availability and performance.

This is part of a series of articles about cloud optimization.

In this article:

• Types of AWS Optimization 
• 15 AWS Optimization Best Practices 
• AWS Autonomous Optimization with Granulate

Types of AWS Optimization 

Here are some of the main cloud aspects that can be optimized.

AWS Cloud Costs

AWS cost optimization is the process of reducing the cost of running applications and infrastructure on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform. It involves identifying and eliminating unnecessary expenses, optimizing resource utilization, and implementing cost-saving strategies.

There are several ways to optimize costs on AWS, including:

• Choosing the right pricing model: AWS offers several pricing models, including On-Demand, Reserved Instances, and Spot Instances. By selecting the right pricing model for your workload, you can save money on AWS usage.
• Using cost optimization tools: AWS provides several tools to help you optimize costs, including AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Trusted Advisor, and AWS Budgets. These tools can help you identify cost-saving opportunities and provide recommendations for optimizing resource utilization.
• Implementing resource utilization best practices: By optimizing resource utilization, you can reduce wasted resources and lower your AWS bill. Best practices include right-sizing instances, using auto scaling, and shutting down unused resources.

Performance 

AWS performance optimization is the process of improving the speed, scalability, and overall performance of applications and infrastructure running on the AWS. cloud platform. It involves identifying and resolving bottlenecks and inefficiencies that can negatively impact performance.

There are several ways to optimize performance on AWS, including:

• Using appropriate instance types and sizes: Choosing the right instance type and size for your workload can improve performance and reduce costs.
• Implementing load balancing: Load balancing can distribute traffic across multiple instances, improving scalability and reducing the risk of downtime.
• Optimizing storage and network configurations: Configuring storage and network resources for maximum performance can improve application response times.
• Implementing caching: Caching frequently accessed data can reduce the load on databases and improve application performance.

Reliability 

AWS reliability optimization is the process of ensuring high availability and fault tolerance of applications and infrastructure running on the cloud. Redundancy is essential for achieving high availability, as it involves duplicating resources and distributing them across multiple availability zones or regions. 

Organizations must balance reliability and cost-effectiveness on AWS. You can do this by using cost-effective redundancy strategies, such as using Multi-AZ deployments, which replicate resources across different availability zones, or implementing load balancing to distribute traffic across multiple instances. These strategies can help your organization achieve high availability without incurring unnecessary expenses.

Environmental Sustainability 

AWS sustainability optimization is the process of reducing the environmental impact of running applications and infrastructure on AWS. This involves implementing sustainable practices and technologies to reduce energy consumption, carbon emissions, and waste. AWS offers a range of sustainability initiatives, such as using renewable energy sources, improving data center efficiency, and providing carbon offset programs. 

You can also implement sustainable practices, such as optimizing resource utilization, using serverless computing, and adopting cloud-native architectures. By optimizing sustainability on AWS, you can reduce their environmental footprint, while also achieving cost savings and improving your brand reputation.

15 AWS Optimization Best Practices 

AWS Cost Optimization Best Practices

Here are some best practices for optimizing costs on AWS:

1. Use Reserved Instances: Reserved Instances provide significant discounts on compute capacity, up to 75% compared to on-demand instances. By purchasing Reserved Instances for predictable workloads, organizations can significantly reduce their AWS bill.
2. Use Spot Instances: Spot Instances provide access to spare AWS compute capacity at significantly reduced prices, sometimes up to 90% less than on-demand prices. Spot Instances are best suited for workloads that can tolerate interruptions, such as batch processing or test and development workloads.
3. Rightsize your instances: Rightsizing involves matching your instance size to your workload requirements. AWS provides a variety of instance types optimized for different workloads. By rightsizing instances, organizations can optimize performance while reducing costs.
4. Use AWS Cost Explorer: AWS Cost Explorer provides a comprehensive view of your AWS spending and helps to identify cost savings opportunities. By analyzing and optimizing AWS usage, organizations can reduce costs while still maintaining the necessary performance and availability of their applications.

AWS Performance Optimization Best Practices

Here are some best practices for optimizing performance on AWS:

5. Use the right instance type: AWS provides a wide variety of instance types optimized for different types of workloads. It is important to choose the right instance type based on the specific requirements of your workload, such as compute, memory, and network performance.
6. Use Auto Scaling: Auto Scaling enables you to automatically adjust the number of instances running your application based on demand. This helps to ensure that your application has the necessary resources to handle traffic spikes, without over-provisioning and incurring unnecessary costs.
7. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): A CDN can help to improve the performance of your application by caching static content at edge locations around the world. This reduces the distance that the content needs to travel to reach end-users, which can result in faster load times and improved user experience.
8. Optimize storage performance: AWS provides various storage options that can be optimized for different types of workloads. It is important to choose the right storage type and configuration to ensure that your application has the necessary performance and throughput.

AWS Reliability Optimization Best Practices

Here are some best practices for optimizing reliability on AWS:

9. Use multiple Availability Zones: AWS provides multiple Availability Zones within each region, which can be used to ensure high availability and disaster recovery. By deploying your application across multiple Availability Zones, you can ensure that your application remains available even if one zone goes down.
10. Use Elastic Load Balancing: Elastic Load Balancing helps to distribute traffic across multiple instances or Availability Zones, improving the availability and reliability of your application. By using Elastic Load Balancing, you can ensure that traffic is evenly distributed and that instances are available to handle requests.
11. Use Amazon Route 53: Amazon Route 53 is a scalable DNS service that can be used to route traffic to your application. By using Amazon Route 53, you can ensure that your application is available and responsive to users around the world.
12. Use Amazon S3 for backup and recovery: Amazon S3 can be used to store backups of your application data, providing a reliable and scalable backup and recovery solution. By using Amazon S3, you can ensure that your application data is available and recoverable in case of a disaster.

AWS Sustainability Optimization Best Practices

Here are some best practices for optimizing sustainability on AWS:

13. Use energy-efficient resources: AWS provides a variety of energy-efficient resources, such as EC2 instances optimized for energy efficiency, which can help to reduce energy consumption and lower costs.
14. Use AWS Storage Gateway for data archiving: AWS Storage Gateway provides a hybrid storage solution that can be used to archive data to Amazon S3 Glacier, a low-cost and highly durable storage solution. By using AWS Storage Gateway, organizations can reduce the amount of physical storage required, which can help to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions.
15. Use AWS Serverless computing: AWS Serverless computing, such as AWS Lambda, can be used to build applications that are highly scalable and require no infrastructure to manage. By using AWS Serverless computing, organizations can reduce their energy consumption and carbon emissions by using only the necessary compute resources.

AWS Autonomous Optimization with Granulate

Granulate continuously and automatically learns an application’s specific resource usage patterns and data flow to identify contended resources, bottlenecks, and prioritization opportunities. Then it optimizes on the runtime level to achieve performance improvements that lead to cost reduction.

When Granulate is deployed on EC2 or EKS workloads, the agent begins learning the workflow, data flow and resource usage patterns within minutes. Following a few days of learning, the agent is activated to start optimizing the application’s performance for up to 45% faster job completion time and 44% reduced AWS costs with zero code changes or development efforts.