How to Optimize AWS Costs in 2025
Learn it 2 days before the year ends!
Victor Garcia
December 29, 2024
In partnership with
🎅 AFTER CHRISTMAS FINOPS MENU
Optimizing AWS costs in 2025
PowerBI Explained (for FinOps)
FOCUS Charge Types & Pricing Models
Mention of Honour: AWS Cost Anomaly with Terraform (Code included)
Job Opportunity by Duckbill Group
Professional Spotlight with the BI Expert of FinOps
AWS
Optimizing AWS costs in 2025
Exploring ways to cut down on costs is vital, especially when using AWS. Here's a guide to some smart strategies to save big on your cloud expenses
Choose the Right Pricing Model: Helps balance cost and flexibility. Consider Reserved Instances and Savings Plans.
Use Free Trials and Free Tiers: Test services without spending initially. Beneficial for startups with low usage needs.
Leverage Programmatic Discounts: Automatically save with some AWS usage levels. Understand and use these discounts smartly.
Reserve Instances for Predictable Needs: Book specific resources ahead to save up to 70%. Suitable for steady, consistent workloads.
Take Advantage of Spot Instances: Use unused AWS capacity for up to 90% off. Ideal for non-urgent or interruptible tasks.
Negotiate Contracts for Better Terms: Larger commitments can lead to big savings. Engage AWS account managers for custom deals.
Opt for Volume Discounts: Big deployments could mean reduced per-unit costs. Aggregate usage across accounts for better rates.
Set Up Cost Alerts: Avoid overspending even on free services. Ensure you never go over budget unknowingly.
In partnership with FinOut
Find Out How Qonto Achieved a 40% Cost Reduction with FinOut's FinOps Platform
Managing cloud infrastructure costs doesn't have to be an overwhelming process. Discover how Qonto transformed its approach with Finout's FinOps platform, achieving:
A 40% reduction in log storage costs
80% cloud spend allocation across teams and applications.
Over 50% savings in anomaly investigation time
With Finout's instant insights and precise on-the-fly cost allocation, Qonto turned cloud cost management into a strategic advantage.
PowerBI
PowerBI for FinOps Explained
Lorant did an amazing series explaining the PowerBI & Fabric capabilities for FinOps. Here’s a brief summary of the series:
Power BI offers different options for building FinOps tools, ranging from basic Excel to advanced Fabric capacities. Excel is good for small datasets and simple analyses. It works well with up to tens of thousands of rows. Excel with Power Query allows connecting to external data sources, handling larger datasets more efficiently. Power BI Desktop is free and can work with millions of rows, but it has limitations on automation and collaboration.
Fabric capacities provide the most complete platform for data and analytics. They include all Power BI Premium features plus additional data processing capabilities.
The choice depends on your data volume, user base size, and required features. As your needs grow, you can move from Excel to more advanced Power BI and Fabric options.
FOCUS
Learning FOCUS: Charge types and pricing models
In the latest post from the FinOps Blog, the focus is on the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) and its charge types and pricing models.
The blog explains the key columns in a FOCUS dataset: ChargeCategory, ChargeClass, PricingCategory, and x_PricingSubcategory.
These columns help FinOps professionals break down and understand various charges, such as usage, purchases, credits, taxes, and adjustments. The post also delves into how different pricing models, like standard, dynamic, and committed pricing, are represented in FOCUS.
Additionally, it highlights the importance of consistent naming conventions and the benefits of using FOCUS for accurate and efficient cost management across multiple cloud providers
👷♂️ FinOps Job Offer
Build the next FinOps product with The Duckbill Group
The Duckbill Group is throwing our hat into the ring by building a new FinOps product and we're looking for another engineer for the team. The role is on-site in San Francisco (we'll help with relocation!).
AWS
Shrink RDS storage: Cut DB costs easily!
Amazon RDS now allows you to shrink storage volumes using Blue/Green Deployments. This helps optimize infrastructure costs when you need less storage.
Previously, reducing RDS storage required manual data migration to a new instance with smaller storage. This was complex and caused downtime. The new process works like this:
Create a "Green" environment that's a copy of your current "Blue" production database
Resize storage on the Green environment
Keep Blue and Green in sync
Switch over to Green as the new production system in about a minute
This works for PostgreSQL 12+, MySQL 5.7+, and MariaDB 10.4+. To use it:
Select your database in the RDS console
Choose "Create Blue/Green Deployment"
Configure the Green environment with smaller storage
Create the deployment and wait for it to be ready
Switch over when ready
Key benefits:
Reduce storage costs when needs decrease
Minimal downtime during switchover
Fully managed process
You can monitor progress in the RDS console or using the AWS CLI. Remember to carefully assess your storage needs before shrinking to avoid performance issues.
🎖️ Mention of Honour
[CODE INSIDE] AWS Cost Anomaly using Terraform
This article explains how to set up AWS Cost Anomaly monitors for linked accounts using Terraform. The author provides code examples for:
Creating a Cost Anomaly monitor for each linked account.
Setting up an Anomaly Subscription to send alerts when spending is above expected levels.
Creating an encrypted SNS topic to receive the alerts.
Configuring AWS ChatBot to send the alerts to a Slack channel.
The code uses Terraform to automate the setup of these monitoring and alerting systems. It helps AWS users keep track of unexpected spending across multiple linked accounts.
🏆 Quick Wins
Announcements
Amazon EKS launches node health monitoring & auto-repair.
AWS has introduced a new feature allowing US customers to change the business name on their AWS invoices without contacting customer support.
Articles & Podcasts
Professional Spotlight
Lorant Kiss
FinOps BI Expert
One of the experts I always like to see talking in FinOps conferences. Glad to know he’s also creating text content (see 3rd piece of this edition). You should follow him if you want to learn about FinOps
Action Items: Read today’s newsletter, and give feedback about FinOps Weekly
That’s all for this week. See you next Sunday!
Before You Go …
Whenever You Are Ready, Here’s How We Can Collaborate
Sponsor this newsletter: Promote your company in this newsletter and reach the Cloud audience that wants to maximize business value and reduce costs.
Collaborate with SmartClouds: Our brand expands to more than just newsletters. Podcasts, Posts, Webinars, Events, and any collaboration related to FinOps are available.
P.S. 1: Know someone who’ll enjoy this newsletter? Please forward it. You’ll make them Stay Ahead in FinOps. Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe and get all editions!
P.S. 2: I’ll do my best to provide you with the best content. However, some of it may slip. If you think something should have been included, please REPLY to this email