Post Syndicated from Bart Thomas original http://www.anchor.com.au/blog/2016/07/aws-discount-voucher/
If you’re looking to reduce your AWS spend, read on.
It’s no secret that the range of cloud services offered by providers such as Amazon Web Services brings many benefits to your business. Despite this, complex usage pricing and a huge range of services (around 60 at this stage!) means that it can be challenging controlling your costs.
And while AWS discount vouchers sadly aren’t really a thing – there are other, simple ways to reduce your AWS costs. Many organisations move to the cloud expecting to save money, but depending on how you’ve set things up, you may find you’re spending more than you expected to. While there are certainly a great many steps you can take to cut AWS costs, Anchor have a very simple solution that can save you anywhere from 5% to 40% on your AWS bills quickly and painlessly – even if you wish to continue using On-Demand server instances.
As you’re almost certainly aware, Amazon Web Services has a somewhat complex, usage-based pricing system. A quick scroll down Amazon’s EC2 pricing page or a minute or two with the “AWS Simple Monthly Calculator” tells its own story.
To help you get your head around AWS pricing they’ve got a guide called “How AWS Pricing Works” which will help you to understand how your costs are calculated, and give you an understanding of the pricing principles behind the various services – EC2, S3, Elastic Beanstalk, OpsWorks – and so on.
If you’re looking to significantly reduce your costs or get discounts on your AWS spend, then under normal circumstances you need to immerse yourself in the world of Reserved Instances (RIs), carefully considering your EC2 instance families and commit to a 1 or 3 year term while deciding whether you want to pay everything upfront, make a partial upfront payment or continue to pay as you go on a monthly basis.
Comparing breakeven points and exploring the differences between All-Upfront and Partial-Upfront Reservations while taking into account existing Reservations you’ve purchased in the context of your current deployment is a huge challenge – especially from a spreadsheet.
It can take hours (days!) to calculate how many reservations you need – and if you buy the wrong quantity or types of Reserved Instances, you could end up spending more money than you save.
While there is quite clearly some work to do and risks to consider, the savings you make can be significant:
Alternatively, if you’d like a simple way to reduce your AWS costs, start getting notified when your spend reaches certain thresholds and get better visibility into your AWS environment usage to unearth further opportunities to save money, you should consider Anchor’s new AWS Caretaker service.
Not only will you get an almost instant reduction in your AWS costs care of our volume discounts and cost-optimisation tech, you get vastly improved monitoring and reporting and have the benefit of Anchor’s AWS-certified support team on-call 24×7.
And if you’re interested in buying RIs, we can add a lot of value here too. Our optimisation engine can recommend RI purchases for each instance type, OS and availability zone, the upfront cost of those purchases, and the estimated savings that will result from those purchases if you maintain your usage patterns.
Get in touch with our team if you’d like to learn more. We’ll quickly review your AWS account and provide you with an estimate of the savings we can deliver (and added value we can provide!) with just a few simple steps.
Get in touch and reduce your next AWS invoice!
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