This course provides an introduction to cost management in AWS. It starts by looking at the economics of the cloud in general, including economies of scale and total cost of ownership, and you'll also learn why cost optimization is important.
We'll also cover the AWS Pricing Calculator and the AWS Well-Architected Framework and how these allow you to optimize your AWS environment and also calculate how much it will cost. We round off the course by taking a look at terminology across areas including software development, DevOps, finance, and general AWS terminology.
Learning Objectives
- Get a foundational understanding of cost optimization in AWS
- Learn the fundamentals of cloud economics including economies of scale, total cost of ownership, and why cost optimization is important
- Learn about the AWS pricing calculator
- Learn about the AWS Well-Architected Framework and how it can help to make your AWS environment more efficient and cost-effective
- Understand a range of terminology linked to cost management in AWS
Intended Audience
This course is intended for cloud architects, business management, or anyone looking to manage their costs effectively in AWS.
Prerequisites
To get the most out of this course, you should already have some experience with the AWS platform.
You've probably heard this one here before: DevOps. DevOps is a set of practices that intends to break down traditional silos between developers and operators of computer systems, allowing combined teams to collaborate and deliver software in a more consistent, efficient and automated fashion.
Enterprise Architecture, or EA, groups are traditionally tasked with outlining the structure of the systems an enterprise will build and maintain to achieve its business goals. Like physical architects, they provide the blueprints for how the various systems should be put together, the "materials" or software concepts that should be used to build them, and how the end results should look.
Lift & Shift. Lift & Shift is a method of migration involving moving an application as currently architected and built from one environment (an on-premises data center) to another (usually a public cloud). Lift & Shift migrations can usually be done more quickly as they often do not require substantial change to the application code or configuration.
However, because they do not modify applications to use cloud-native services, they tend to create situations where the cloud system is more expensive or difficult to run than the on-premises system had been.
Lift & Shift migrations are typically used when time pressure to close a data center or other need outweighs the cost and quality issues. A remediation period for the environment should always be planned After a Lift & Shift migration to address issues.
Workload is a generic name for an application or software system running on a computing or other platform.
In a traditional website, there might be a web server, an application server and a database server, each running on an individual hardware-based server, or virtual machine in my data center, each of those three elements of the application would be a workload running on that virtual server.
On-Premises (or On-Prem) is a term used to refer to company-owned or company-controlled data center space. Usually used to differentiate from public cloud environments where application migrations are targeting workloads.
Companies have an extensive On-premises infrastructure built over many years when they begin using the cloud, and there are often difficulties using systems, infrastructure or processes developed for the on-premises environment in the public cloud.
Rightsizing is a form of optimization where measurements are taken over time to match workloads to a virtual resource sized to run it efficiently with a minimum of waste. Rightsizing can be used as a technique to save costs but must always involve technology oversight as well.
Agile is a method of project management, used primarily for software development characterized by division of tasks to short phases of work (into sprints) and frequent assessment of priorities and plans. Generally, leads to development of products or software incrementally beginning with a minimum viable product and then continually enhancing it from a backlog of requirements.
Oliver Gehrmann is a FinOps Consultant and CEO of kreuzwerker Frankfurt, a German consulting firm with a strong focus on AWS, software engineering, and cloud financial management. He's worked in IT for over 10 years, facilitating the migration from physical servers in data centers to modern cloud infrastructures.
He and his team have experienced first-hand that costs in the cloud are becoming more and more of a challenge when about 2.5 years ago more and more customers approached them with this topic. Costs ran out of control and could not be addressed to business values.
Since that time, we have worked extensively on the topic of cloud financial management and have already been able to save our customers many millions of dollars. He now shares this knowledge in order to help others.