Optimize Amazon Web Services Portfolio
Amazon Web Services dominates the global cloud computing market and is a favored choice among Fortune 500 companies and various other organizations across the globe. It's particularly popular among startups for its scalability and ease in setting up environments for collaboration or service hosting.
However, this flexibility can also pose a financial risk as cloud expenses can rapidly spiral out of control. LicenseQ has successfully assisted numerous organizations in tackling their FinOps challenges, achieving significant savings on their AWS cloud consumption. We invite you to leverage our expertise for your benefit.
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Understanding AWS Services Pricing Models
AWS offers customers a multitude of choices, making it great for customization, however also making it difficult to predict and control costs. Navigating the licensing landscape of Amazon Web Services can be overwhelming as its service options each come with their own pricing model, which can include variables like data transfer rates, storage capacity, and compute power.
Many organizations end up choosing suboptimal plans or overlook potential discounts, leading to unnecessary expenditures. Thus, managing AWS licenses effectively requires a nuanced understanding of the platform’s diverse offerings and pricing structures. Our independent consultants are here to help you.
Highlights and what you can expect from LicenseQ
- AWS optimization report
- Continuous Cloud Cost Reduction strategy
- Procurement & benchmarking advice
- Advisory Services for AWS usage
Effectively control your cloud costs
The yearly spending on cloud computing services is experiencing exponential growth, making it crucial to understand the sources of these costs and how to manage them effectively. Failure to do so could substantially strain your budget. Redirecting any cost savings towards innovative technologies can be more beneficial than questioning why cloud adoption hasn’t been as cost-effective as initially expected. The skilled consultants at LicenseQ employ best-in-class FinOps strategies that can deliver meaningful financial benefits for your organization.Please reach out to us via the button below with questions regarding your specific business case or generic questions. We will come back to you as soon as we can.
Amazon Web Services - a detailed guide
What is Amazon Web Services (AWS)?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform that offers a broad set of global compute, storage, database, analytics, application, and deployment services that help organizations move faster, lower costs and scale.
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): Provides scalable computing capacity in the cloud. You can use EC2 to launch virtual machines (VMs) that are tailored to your specific needs.
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3): Highly scalable object storage service that can be used to store any type of data, including images, videos, and text files.
- Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS): Provides managed relational database services that are compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle.
- Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS): Managed service that makes deployment and management of containerized applications easy.
- Amazon Lambda: serverless computing service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers
Top tips for Amazon Web Services Optimization
Implement Sound FinOps Practices
While AWS provides tools for effective environment setup, managing your cloud usage can still be challenging. Implementing robust FinOps strategies such as account tagging and billing management are crucial for controlling expenditures.
Regularly Analyze Your Consumption
We recommend routinely examining your month-to-month usage to spot significant changes and understand their origin. Anticipate areas of potential growth for better financial planning. Knowing the details of your billing statement is vital for identifying optimization opportunities
Leverage AWS Tools for Cost-Efficiency
Understanding how financial models like AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances operate is instrumental in lowering your cloud expenses. Make sure to maximize any AWS resources that can help you effectively minimize unnecessary cloud costs.
How big is the AWS market share?
AWS is the largest cloud computing platform in the world, with over 300 services and millions of customers around the globe. It is estimated that AWS has over 20% of the global cloud market share. AWS is used by millions of customers around the world, including startups, small businesses, large enterprises, and government agencies. Some of the most well-known companies that use AWS include Netflix, Airbnb, and Spotify.
AWS data centers are located in 26 regions and 81 Availability Zones around the world. This gives AWS customers the ability to deploy their applications close to their users, which can help to improve performance and reduce latency.
Cost optimization within AWS Well-Architected
The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a set of guidelines and tools that can help you build well-architected systems on AWS. The framework is based on six pillars:- Operational excellence: The ability to run and monitor your systems in a production environment.
- Security: The ability to protect your systems and data from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, or destruction.
- Reliability: The ability of your systems to perform their intended functions correctly and consistently over time.
- Performance efficiency: The ability of your systems to deliver the desired performance and scalability.
- Cost optimization: The ability to run your systems in a cost-effective way.
- Sustainability: The ability to design, operate, and dispose of your systems in an environmentally responsible way.
Cost optimization pillar
AWS provides a variety of tools to help you track, report, and analyze your AWS costs over time, and identify opportunities for optimization. These tools include:- AWS Cost Explorer: Provides a comprehensive view of your AWS costs and usage, with the ability to create custom reports and forecasts.
- AWS Trusted Advisor: Identifies potential areas for optimization in your AWS environment, such as underutilized resources or inefficient configurations.
- AWS Budgets: Allows you to set custom budgets and receive alerts when your costs or usage exceed your budget.
- Amazon CloudWatch: Collects and tracks metrics from your AWS resources, so you can monitor your usage and performance.
- AWS CloudTrail: Records all activity in your AWS account, so you can track who did what and when.
- Amazon S3 Analytics: Provides insights into your Amazon S3 storage usage, such as access patterns and costs.
- AWS Cost and Usage Report: Provides a detailed report of your AWS costs and usage, which you can download and analyze using your own tools.
How does AWS compare to other cloud providers?
Ultimately, Amazon Web Services offers the widest range of cloud services and has the largest customer base of any cloud provider, with millions of customers globally. As mentioned above, it has the largest market share. One downside of AWS is that its pricing model can be more complex than other cloud providers, depending on the services you use.
AWS is constantly innovating and adding new services, which keeps it attractive to customers. It is a good choice for businesses of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises.
How to get started with Amazon Web Services
Follow these steps to start using AWS:
- Create an AWS account and choose a payment method
- Review the AWS Free Tier: The AWS Free Tier gives you access to a variety of AWS services for free for a limited period of time. This is a great way to get started with AWS and try out its services before you commit to a paid plan.
- Choose a region and Availability Zone: AWS Regions are isolated geographic areas, and Availability Zones are isolated locations within a Region. This helps to ensure that your applications are highly available and fault-tolerant.
- Launch an EC2 instance: EC2 instances are virtual machines that you can use to run your applications on AWS.
- Connect to your EC2 instance: You can connect to your EC2 instance using SSH.
- Start using AWS services: Once you are connected to your EC2 instance, you can start using AWS services to build and deploy your applications.
How is Amazon Web Services billed?
AWS billing is based on a pay-as-you-go model. This means that you are charged for the resources that you use, such as compute, storage, and bandwidth. AWS offers a variety of pricing options, including on-demand, reserved and spot instances. Most of the services are charged on an hourly basis; this means a customer are charged for the amount of time they use a service.
On-demand instances are the most flexible type of instance, but they are also the most expensive. Reserved instances are less expensive than on-demand instances, but you must commit to using them for a certain period of time. Spot instances are the cheapest type of instance, but they can be interrupted at any time. AWS also offers a variety of billing tools and reports to help you track your spending and optimize your costs.
How to license Microsoft software on Amazon Web Services
Microsoft offers a variety of options for using new and existing Microsoft software licenses on the AWS Cloud. You can purchase Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) or Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) license-included instances, which provide you with new, fully compliant Windows Server and SQL Server licenses from AWS. Your existing licenses may be used on AWS with Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts, Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances, or EC2 instances with default tenancy using Microsoft License Mobility through Software Assurance.
AWS License Manager now allows you to easily change license types between AWS provided licenses (license included) and bring-your-own-license (BYOL) with your own licensed media of EC2 instances for Windows Server and SQL Server workloads.
If you want to purchase new Microsoft licenses, or utilize existing ones, you can rely on AWS to run your Microsoft software. You can save on licensing and compute costs through an assessment of your Windows Server and SQL Server workloads.
You have two options for bringing licenses to AWS:
- With Software Assurance: Microsoft License Mobility through Software Assurance allows many Microsoft software licenses to be brought into the AWS Cloud for use with Amazon EC2.
- Without Software Assurance: Using Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts, you can access hardware fully dedicated for your use. This makes it possible to bring Microsoft software licenses that do not have Software Assurance or License Mobility benefits as long as the licenses were purchased prior to October 1, 2019 or added as a True-up under an active Enterprise Enrollment that was effective prior to October 1, 2019.
Please note that on-premises licenses purchased without Software Assurance and mobility rights cannot be deployed with dedicated hosted cloud services offered by the following public cloud providers: Microsoft, Alibaba, Amazon (including VMware Cloud on AWS), and Google.