Getting Started with AWS Cost Optimization Hub | Amazon Web Services

Key Takeaways

Are you interested in saving money on your AWS bill? Or maybe you're looking for a tool that consolidates all of your cost optimization recommendations into a single dashboard. Well, in this video, we're going to show you how to leverage a tool called AWS Compute Optimizer. We're going to teach you first of all how to enable the tool and then secondly, we're going to teach you best practices on how to slice and dice the data so that you and your teams can start flashing your AWS costs. Thanks for joining today's session everyone. My name is Connor Murphy and I'm a senior cloud POS architect here at AWS on the optics team. Today I'm joined by my colleague Rosa Corley and we're going to be walking through best practices when leveraging cost optimization hub. Ros, do you mind quickly introducing yourself before we dive into the material? Yes. So my name is Rosa Corley and I a cloud finance architect here at AWS and the optics team as well. Awesome. Thanks Rosa. So cost optimization hub is a tool that allows you to easily identify, filter and consolidate over 15 different types of AWS cost optimization recommendations. Things from EBS volumes to EC2 instance right sizing. Even your commitment recommendations are all going to be located right in cost optimization hub. Throughout today's demo, we plan to show you how to aggregate opportunities by different levers or attributes. We're going to teach you how to view and interpret these different optimization opportunities. We're then going to walk through how you can export this data to share it out with your engineering teams or the teams that are actually owning your resources. And then we'll just wrap some quick takeaways. Yeah, let's go ahead. So, first of all, we want to make sure that do we have cost optimization enabled? One thing you're going to go into is within the billing and cost management side. You will scroll down all the way towards like the bottom portion and you will see under savings and commitments the cost optimization hub. You will click on that and then you will either have uh a screen where it's going to give you a description of what cost optimization hub is and then a button where it's going to say enable or you will have this screen which it's already enabled and you will have a number here based on any cost optimization recommendations it provides. Now that you know that we have either one enabled it or it has been enabled. I'm going to go ahead and minimize this just to be able to show more on my screen. So let's go ahead and see like how do we aggregate how do we view what those recommendations are. So first of all we want to go under the aggregated estimated savings by and under resource type we have several different types of aggregation styles that we want to go through. For this demo we want to go ahead and just do recommended action. And within recommended action, we now see that we have several different uh values of like migrate to graviton, stop idle and or unused resources or even delete idle or unused resources here. So let's say we want to go even more in depth on that. So let's go ahead and actually click on this little filter button here. And we have several different ways on how we can slice this data into the different mechanisms we want to look at it. So, let's go ahead and under all recommended actions, I want to go in and actually select migrate to Graviton since that's what my customer is focused on doing right now. If I if I check this off, it will f fully focus on anything that there is to migrate to Graviton. So, I can see here that I already have $551 per month in estimated monthly savings. So, let's go in and actually see what we can find here. Within the view opportunities, you're going to see a list of several different resources that are applicable to migrate to Graviton. In this list, you'll have your estimated monthly savings, what those resource types are, IDs, as well as those recommended actions, going into what types of instance you're in, and going more granular as far as what's those savings percentages, the implementation effort, and most importantly, at least for my customers, they want to make sure they understand what accounts these are falling in and what tags they are in as well, because that's how they like to leverage it. So let's go ahead and actually click on this one. So clicking on this radio button here, I want to dive in more into what this EC2 instance is telling me that I have recommended availability for. So first of all, we will see here what our current instance type is. So we currently see it's an R5 for extra large. We can see the current usage. Keep in mind that this is only capturing 14 days. And then we'll be able to see the different costs uh before discounts and estimated savings as well. Going into the recommended instance type, this is what it recommends. Now, I would highly recommend to go in and do further investigation, but based on what your workloads and applications are, but based on what it's looking at the data here, um, it is letting you know if you do move over from R54 extra large to R six G4 extra large, this is what the usage would look like. This is what your cost would look like before discounts and the estimated savings based on the different instance type. Moving over to Graviton. Now, here we'll see this is what that $156 per month estimated savings is. And as I suggested, I would highly recommend if either you're in the PHOPS team or if you are going to push this on to the engineering team to go in and actually look more and investigate. You can either go directly into that EC2 console or I would highly recommend to go into compute optimizer and actually do a little bit more in-depth uh granular investigation. Rosa, this is awesome, right? Because you get a single view of all the recommendations across your organization, but from my perspective, I've generally seen most customers using cost optimization hub at more of that central phops team level, right? to identify opportunities and then they need to to push those out to their engineering teams who are actually owning the resources that we want to make changes on. Do you have any recommendations for say a central POPS person like myself who could um you know export this data and distribute it out so that their teams could start taking action? Do you mind walking through that step as well? Yes. So that's a great question and definitely once you do have like a list of items that you want to uh bring this to attention to your engineering team, we do have a create recurring export to Amazon S3. And if we click on that, what we'll do is we will already leave this settings set as the way they are. Uh we'll set standard data export here. We will put a name, a unique identifier name, but just for demo purpose, we'll just say demo savings. And then here we'll select what type of content do we want to bring in. So our primary focus is on cost optimization recommendation. So we'll leave this selected. And we'll scroll down. Now you have options to either par it or you can do a gzip text/csv file. um depending on what li permissions you have or how you want to disperse this data. For this example, I'm going to go ahead and select uh to a CSV file just because it's easier for us to uh put this into a CSV format. Um and then what we want to do for file versioning, we want to make sure that we overwrite existing data export files. Now, if you want to keep anything track over time, keep in mind you can do that with create new data export files every time, but highly recommend doing an overwrite. Once you have that, you'll select what S3 bucket you want to store this data in and then go from there uh when clicking on create. Awesome. Thank you, Rosa. So, correct me if I'm wrong, but it from my perspective, kind of the main takeaways that I'm seeing from this tool are one, make sure it's enabled, right? The tool's free of charge to enable. you're going to immediately start getting awesome cost optimization recommendations that you and your team can start actioning. Make sure that you play around with this a little bit. Understand what filters and attributes work for your for you and your organization. Maybe you want to play around with them a little bit to understand, hey, should we be running a campaign on Graviton? Maybe we need to clean up some of our EBS volumes, right? All the data is right there and it can really help you prioritize. And then last but not least, generally we see teams leverage this more from a central Finops team, but be sure that we're exporting that data so that then you can distribute out to your organizations and see that they're actually starting to drive some change. Ros, I don't know if you had anything that I missed there that you wanted to add. I definitely say uh enable cost optimization hub, get into looking what your savings are and and start optimizing. Awesome. Thank you, Rosa. And thank you all for joining. Be sure to like this video and sub and subscribe to our channel to make sure that you're keeping up to date with all the awesome content that we're putting out here. See you next time.