AWS (Amazon Web Service) is a widely used online cloud platform that provides cost-effective and scalable cloud computing solutions. Many companies and organizations use Amazon Web Service because it offers numerous on-demand operations like content delivery and data storage on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. While the benefits of Amazon Web Service are well-known, without continuous oversight, visibility, and cost-effective infrastructure, it’s easy to overspend.
For most organizations, a sizeable part of their IT budget goes to cloud providers. This has increased the need for businesses to understand their cloud budget and bill to ensure they’re making the most out of their spending. According to Flexera’s 2023 State of the Cloud Report, the top cloud challenge for 82% of organizations is managing cloud spending. Most companies underestimate their wasted spend when it comes to public cloud adoption and use, resulting in stubbornly high cloud costs.
The good news is that companies can reduce cloud costs and optimize performance in AWS cloud application development. Even though Amazon Web Service is the most cost-effective public cloud platform that actively offers regular price cuts, it’s still vital to take measures to lower costs to save money.
In this article, we discuss key strategies companies can use to reduce costs and optimize performance in AWS cloud application development services.
Choosing the Right AWS Services for Your Application
Cloud computing is a vital aspect of your company’s digital transformation strategy. It allows your business to scale, grow, and innovate in today’s highly digitized and competitive landscape. However, many companies make the mistake of going all out on cloud applications. They think they’ll get more value. Instead, they’re wasting money on services they don’t need.
Take time to identify what AWS services you require and how they help you achieve your bottom line. You can start by looking at what business flows the application will support, such as customer sign-up or submitting orders. This is especially vital for e-commerce retailers. Choosing the right AWS services ensures you only pay for what you need and resources that offer value.
Amazon Web Service provides a wide range of services and features you can choose from based on your web application needs. From AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2, and Amazon RDS to Amazon CloudSearch and Amazon EMR, the list is endless, which can make selection confusing and frustrating. Your custom software development firm can help you understand the complexities of AWS services. They can guide and advise you when choosing the right AWS services for your application.
Best Practices
When choosing the right AWS services for your application, here are some best practices to follow:
- Before you choose any AWS service, consider how it will impact your business. Look at the company flows the application will support, who executes the business flows, and the frequency of each business flow.
- Identify how much control you need and which Amazon Web Service option gives you that control. For example, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) doesn’t give you the same control, responsibility, and services as Platform as a Service (PaaS).
- Look at the services you’re considering and whether they’re available in your chosen Amazon Web Service region. Not all AWS services are available in all Amazon Web Service regions. Be sure to evaluate the cost of each AWS region, as some cost more than others.
- Evaluate the service limits of the AWS services you’re considering. Your business will eventually grow, and you don’t want the limits of your chosen Amazon Web Service configuration to hinder your scalability and performance.
- Similarly, identify what can be scaled in the particular AWS services you choose. For example, Dynamo DB capacity units, EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancers, Lambda function concurrency, and RDS read replicas.
- Look at how easily you can integrate the AWS services you choose with other services.
- Assess the common error scenarios for different AWS services and start the design for failure recovery strategies. Some common failure scenarios include failure to access existing Amazon Web Service resources and failure to create new Amazon Web Service resources, which result in lost revenue.
Considerations
Some additional factors to consider when choosing the right AWS services:
- Mechanisms and tools for data safety and protection vary by service. You have to consider this for user authentication, authorization, and auditing to ensure data security. One service organizations can use to ensure data security is AWS Identity Access Management (IAM). AWS IAM authenticates, controls, manages, and monitors privileged access to company information systems. This minimizes data theft and cybersecurity attacks, saving you money in data recovery and ransom.
- Ensure the AWS service you’re evaluating supports all code components in your application, as not all application code can be implemented using Software Development Kits.
- When evaluating a particular service and its integrations, it’s much easier if they’re in the same region.
Implementing Cost Optimization Strategies for AWS Cloud Infrastructure
Another way you can reduce your cloud costs is to implement cost-optimization strategies for AWS Cloud Infrastructure. Amazon Web Service offers a broad suite of cost optimization and management tools for monitoring your application costs to identify modernizing and rightsizing opportunities. For instance, you can use tags in your environment to track your Amazon Web Service costs and organize your resources. This can be AWS-generated tags, user-defined allocation tags, or cost allocation tags.
Amazon Web Service Savings Plans is another cost optimization strategy that offers flexibility based on commitment periods and spending levels. It includes AWS Fargate, AWS EC2, and AWS Lambda. AWS Lambda, for example, is a very good option when it comes to running serverless code at a minimal compute. Serverless computing is often key in minimizing cost since it uses a pay-per-use consumption model. So your company doesn’t incur costs when the IT infrastructure is idle.
Other cost optimization strategies to implement include:
- Using commitment discounts such as reserved instances (RIs) and usage discounts for long-term commitments.
- Using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances for flexible or fault-tolerant applications and test and development workload.
- Using Amazon CloudFront CDN to reduce your data transfer costs. The content delivery network securely transfers at faster speeds and lower latency from Edge servers, which reduces round trips to origin servers. This provides huge performance gain.
Leveraging AWS Auto Scaling to Optimize Application Performance and Reduce Costs
If your application experiences an unprecedented spike or traffic fluctuations regularly, you should have enough instances to support it without spending an arm and a leg. An easy way to automatically scale your application and adjust its capacity to maintain speed is through AWS Auto Scaling. Amazon Web Service Auto Scaling monitors your application to ensure it has the right amount of capacity to handle the current traffic demand.
It provides a steady, predictable performance at the lowest cost possible, reducing your cloud costs while optimizing application performance. With AWS Auto Scaling, you can set up application scaling across multiple services and resources to maintain your application’s availability in all instances.
CloudFormation Best Practices for AWS Cloud Application Development
AWS CloudFormation is a service that helps you create, manage, and set up your Amazon Web Service resources, so you spend more time focusing on the applications that run on Amazon Web Service. The service configures and provisions all the resources you want, eliminating the hustle of figuring out what’s dependent on what. Here are some CloudFormation best practices:
- Perform early linting and testing of your templates to discover potential configuration and syntax issues.
- Organize your stacks by lifecycle and ownership to make managing, coordinating, and communicating updates easier.
- Use cross-track references to export shared resources.
- Reuse templates to replicate your infrastructure in multiple environments.
- Validate templates before using them to catch semantic and syntax errors.
Best Practices for Deploying and Managing Applications on AWS ECS
Amazon Web Service ECS is a management container service that lets you run your application on a managed cluster of Amazon E2 instances. Before you run an application using ECS, here are some best practices for deploying and managing applications on ECS:
- Store all files inside the container image as static to reduce the number of potentially breaking events that may occur during deployment.
- Keep container images as small as possible to maintain fast container launch times.
- Always run a single application process with a container image, and if it crashes, let Amazon ECS replace it as needed to ensure a clean and safer environment.
- Use a separate task definition family for only one business purpose to allow individual scaling.
Monitoring and Performance Optimization for AWS Cloud Applications
Monitoring the performance of your cloud infrastructure is crucial to the proper functioning of your IT environment. Although Amazon Web Service Cloud is a well-architected framework, you can enhance the capabilities of your AWS services, optimize performance, and reduce costs with Amazon Web Service performance monitoring tools. These tools help you track resource usage to determine whether your instances are under or overutilized. They include:
- Datadog AWS Monitoring
- AWS CloudWatch
- AWS CloudTrail
- AWS Certificate Manager
- AWS Monitoring Dashboard
Best Practices
When monitoring your Amazon Web Service resources, the following best practices can ensure you don’t overlook any resources while getting the most value for your money:
- Track and monitor important KPIs for various AWS services to help enhance their performance and capabilities.
- Analyze, detect, and resolve performance issues before they affect end users.
- Set up alerts in Amazon Web Service when a threshold has been reached to scale up the instances automatically.
- Amazon Web Service production deployments are too dynamic and large to monitor manually, so use automation to handle your monitoring tasks.
- Define priority levels for monitoring tasks to ensure data is protected and critical services remain operational.
- Take advantage of the cloud environment to experiment with different configuration changes before implementing them.
- Create automation flows using AWS Lamba to optimize and streamline your cloud application development. For instance, you can send recommendation emails to end users based on their buying experiences. Automation is the best option when it comes to saving costs, as it eliminates redundancy while increasing system efficiencies.
Bottom Line
Businesses can reduce costs and optimize performance in AWS cloud application development by choosing the right AWS services, implementing cost optimization strategies, and monitoring the performance of cloud infrastructure.
If you’re considering running your application with Amazon Web Service, you need a reliable digital transformation partner like Practical Logix to help with the adoption and implementation. We understand the importance of reducing IT costs and can help your business with a range of digital transformation services and solutions, including cloud engineering, Amazon Web Service, blockchain technology, and cloud application development services.
We recently helped MGM Studios with its digital transformation using Amazon Web Service and blockchain technology. Contact us today for digital transformation using Amazon Web Service.
