Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - Smart savings: Amazon EC2 cost-optimization strategies (CMP211)

Summary

Boyd McGeeky, director of go-to-market for AWS networking and compute services, discusses strategies for optimizing Amazon EC2 costs.
Smart savings are defined as cost reductions that do not limit future innovation, restrict business responsiveness, or negatively impact customers.
Bad savings examples include deleting data for immediate cost reduction without considering future AI/ML strategies, pausing modernization efforts, and halting cloud migrations.
Good savings enable agility, rapid innovation, and improved or maintained customer performance while reducing costs.
Strategies discussed include scaling with AWS services, right-sizing instances, optimizing purchase options, and leveraging Spot Instances.
The importance of instance flexibility and fault tolerance when using Spot Instances is emphasized.
AWS Compute Optimizer and Cloud Intelligence Dashboards are tools for continuous optimization.
Graviton processors offer significant performance improvements and cost savings.
Serverless architectures are recommended for workloads with idle time to pay only for what is used.
Carpenter, an AWS-built provisioning system for Kubernetes, automates scaling, right-sizing, and instance selection, including Spot Instances.

Spot Instances have saved customers over $10 billion since 2013, while Savings Plans have saved $30 billion since 2019.
Attribute-based instance selection and AWS Compute Optimizer can automate the process of selecting the most cost-effective instances.
Savings Plans offer up to 66% discounts and are flexible across instance types, regions, and AWS services.
Graviton processors are rapidly improving, with Graviton 4 offering 30% better CPU performance over Graviton 3.
Serverless services like AWS Lambda and Amazon Aurora Serverless can significantly reduce costs by eliminating idle time charges.
Carpenter for Kubernetes simplifies the management of EC2 resources and can handle many cost optimization strategies automatically.
The Cloud Intelligence Dashboards provide a suite of insights for different roles within an organization, from executives to developers, to track and manage efficiency and optimization goals.
The session emphasizes the importance of not just focusing on immediate cost savings but also considering the long-term impact on innovation, customer experience, and business agility.