Making the Most of your AWS Reserved Instances to Grow Your Savings

Savings Plans vs Reserved Instances Back in October 2019, AWS introduced Savings Plans, and a belief that Reserved Instances are dead began. People thought that because of the simplicity and flexibility of some types of Savings Plans, that Reserved Instances wouldn’t have a place anymore. However, that’s just not true. While Standard Reserved Instances have […]

How to Cut Your AWS Cloud Costs

Is the prospect of optimizing your AWS costs making you lose sleep at night? Having been sold on the huge benefits of switching from large capital investments to pay-for-what-you-use OPEX, you may be disappointed when your new cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP etc) hits you with a surprisingly large bill to pay. You might feel […]

How to use AWS Reserved Instances in the post-Savings Plans world

When Savings Plans debuted in late 2019, they instantly changed the incentives for using Reserved Instances in AWS cost optimisation strategies. Prior to Savings Plans, both Standard and Convertible RIs had been viable ways to reduce AWS spend. But the added convenience of Savings Plans — which apply discounts automatically without the need to perform […]

AWS Cost Optimization with Babelfish, Aurora Serverless 2 and Gp3 storage

The ideal AWS cost optimization strategy is never set in stone, because new tools and opportunities for savings are always being added to the AWS ecosystem. Indeed, the December 2020 AWS re:Invent keynote featured several announcements with potentially major implications for optimising AWS costs. Let’s take a look at three of them in greater detail. […]

Lockdown brands spending $5 million per month in AWS

Although lockdowns related to the COVID-19 pandemic sharply reduced economic activity in many sectors — think the dramatic, immediate declines in airline bookings, hotel reservations and movie theater ticket purchases, for instance — they actually increased overall cloud spend.   Industries such as media and publishing, financial services, IT, and logistics all had to respond […]

What the COVID-19 downturn means for cloud spending and cloud costs

At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, cloud spending levels remained remarkably resilient given the wider economic turmoil. Between the rapid shift to telecommuting, increased e-commerce activity and rising demand for digital services ranging from news to video gaming, consumption of services from cloud providers like AWS stayed strong throughout early 2020.   According to […]

As AWS usage accelerates, how can organisations control their cloud costs?

Cloud spending has proven highly resilient to the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.   According to tech market research firm Canalys, worldwide spend on AWS and other cloud providers in Q2 2020 actually rose 11% quarter-over-quarter, and 34% year-over-year. This increase, over a time period when many industries struggled with diminished investment and revenue, […]