Day 11 - Compute Optimizer

AWS Cost Optimisation Advent Calendar 2024

3 min read time

#aws #ec2 #ebs #lambda

Welcome to day 11 of the unofficial AWS Cost Optimisation Advent Calendar 2024, where every day we will be sharing new tips or tricks to help you optimise your cloud costs before Christmas 2024.

Today we will be looking at the AWS Compute Optimizer, a service that automatically monitors and recommends adjustments to your AWS resources to help you save money.

On Day 5 we looked at rightsizing your RDS instances and today we are going to cover all other resources supported by the Compute Optimizer, namely:

• Fargate
• EC2
• EBS Volumes
• Lambda Functions

Of course Compute Optimizer also does RDS instances, so if you missed that day be sure to check it out as RDS is a bit more nuanced.

1. The Basics

To get started with the Compute Optimizer, you need to enable it in the AWS Management Console. Once enabled, the Compute Optimizer will start analysing your resources and provide recommendations on how to save money.

There is a small cost involved with Compute Optimizer, but it is generally worth it as the savings you can make are usually much higher.

It will then analyse for a few days and produce a dashboard similar to the below:

It will further break it down by service like the below:

2. Recommendations

The Compute Optimizer will provide recommendations on how to save money on your resources and even suggest the instance type or storage size that it thinks you should be using.

The caveat here is that you will have more intimate knowledge of your workloads and the reasons the instances are the size they are, so it is always worth doing some investigation and your own research first before simply following the recommendations and find yourself under-provisioned at a critical moment.

We have touched on examples throughout this series such as occasional spikes or certain parts of the application which still require further performance optimisations.

3. Conclusion

The AWS Compute Optimizer is one of the fastest ways to find resources that are over-provisioned in your infrastructure.

It has improved massively since launch and is probably equal to or even outperforming many propriety tools that were developed prior.

If it is not enabled yet, click that button today and we will see you tomorrow for the next tip!

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