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Operational Excellence
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- Resources have identified owners
- Processes and procedures have identified owners
- Operations activities have identified owners responsible for their performance
- Team members know what they are responsible for
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- Mechanisms exist to request additions, changes, and exceptions
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- Executive Sponsorship
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Security
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- Evaluate and implement new security services and features regularly
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- Build a program that embeds security ownership in workload teams
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Reliability
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- How do you ensure sufficient gap between quotas and maximum usage to accommodate failover?
- How do you automate quota management?
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- How do you enforce non-overlapping private IP address ranges in all private address spaces?
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- Monitor end-to-end tracing of requests through your system
- Conduct reviews regularly
- Analytics
- Automate responses (Real-time processing and alarming)
- Send notifications (Real-time processing and alarming)
- Define and calculate metrics (Aggregation)
- Monitor End-to-End Tracing of Requests Through Your System
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- Monitor all components of the workload to detect failures
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- Rely on the data plane and not the control plane during recovery
- Use static stability to prevent bimodal behavior
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- Architect your product to meet availability targets and uptime service level agreements (SLAs)
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Cost Optimization
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- Establish ownership of cost optimization
- Establish a partnership between finance and technology
- Establish cloud budgets and forecasts
- Implement cost awareness in your organizational processes
- Monitor cost proactively
- Keep up-to-date with new service releases
- Quantify business value from cost optimization
- Report and notify on cost optimization
- Create a cost-aware culture
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- Perform cost analysis for different usage over time
- Analyze all components of this workload
- Perform a thorough analysis of each component
- Select components of this workload to optimize cost in line with organization priorities
- Perform cost analysis for different usage over time
- Select software with cost effective licensing
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Performance
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- Learn about and understand available cloud services and features
- Evaluate how trade-offs impact customers and architecture efficiency
- Use guidance from your cloud provider or an appropriate partner to learn about architecture patterns and best practices
- Factor cost into architectural decisions
- Use policies and reference architectures
- Use benchmarking to drive architectural decisions
- Use a data-driven approach for architectural choices
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- Use purpose-built data store that best support your data access and storage requirements
- Collect and record data store performance metrics
- Evaluate available configuration options for data store
- Implement Strategies to Improve Query Performance in Data Store
- Implement data access patterns that utilize caching
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- Understand how networking impacts performance
- Evaluate available networking features
- Choose appropriate dedicated connectivity or VPN for your workload
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- Choose network protocols to improve performance
- Choose your workload's location based on network requirements
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- Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure workload health and performance
- Use monitoring solutions to understand the areas where performance is most critical
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- Review metrics at regular intervals
- Load test your workload
- Use automation to proactively remediate performance-related issues
- Keep your workload and services up-to-date
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Sustainability
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- Optimize geographic placement of workloads based on their networking requirements
- Align SLAs with sustainability goals
- Optimize geographic placement of workloads based on their networking requirements
- Stop the creation and maintenance of unused assets
- Optimize team member resources for activities performed
- Implement buffering or throttling to flatten the demand curve
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- Optimize software and architecture for asynchronous and scheduled jobs
- Remove or refactor workload components with low or no use
- Optimize areas of code that consume the most time or resources
- Optimize impact on devices and equipment
- Use software patterns and architectures that best support data access and storage patterns
- Remove unneeded or redundant data
- Use technologies that support data access and storage patterns
- Use policies to manage the lifecycle of your datasets
- Use shared file systems or storage to access common data
- Back up data only when difficult to recreate
- Use elasticity and automation to expand block storage or file system
- Minimize data movement across networks
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- Articles coming soon
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Perform cost analysis for different usage over time
PostedDecember 20, 2024
UpdatedDecember 20, 2024
ByKevin McCaffrey
Evaluating costs effectively requires a thorough analysis of various AWS services across multiple usage scenarios. By conducting this analysis over time and projecting future usage levels, organizations can ensure that they are optimizing their workloads for cost efficiency throughout their lifecycle.
Best Practices
- Engage in Regular Cost Review Sessions: Conduct bi-monthly or quarterly reviews of service costs as usage patterns evolve. Regular reviews help identify overspending and allow for the opportunity to switch to more cost-effective service options as workloads scale.
- Leverage AWS Cost Management Tools: Utilize AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets to analyze service costs. By visualizing cost trends, you can make informed decisions about resource usage and budgeting to avoid unexpected expenses.
Supporting Questions
- Are you regularly monitoring your AWS expenditures?
- Have you established KPIs for measuring service efficiency?
Roles and Responsibilities
- Cloud Financial Analyst: Responsible for conducting cost analyses and ensuring spending aligns with projected budgets. This role uses AWS tools to track costs and provides recommendations for service usage optimization.
- Solutions Architect: Designs architectures that maximize cost efficiency. They select appropriate services based on projected load and operational goals, ensuring optimal spend.
Artifacts
- AWS Cost Management Dashboard: A tool that provides an overview of spending and service usage, allowing teams to track costs effectively against their budgets.
- Cost Projection Reports: Documentation detailing projected costs based on different usage patterns, aiding in decision-making for resource scaling.
Cloud Services
AWS
- Amazon EC2: Offers scalable compute capacity. Understanding usage patterns helps in optimizing instance types and managing costs.
- Amazon RDS: Provides managed relational database services, freeing users from overhead and potentially lowering operational costs when properly sized.
- Amazon S3: Scalable storage with tiered pricing. Evaluating storage needs helps select the correct storage class to minimize costs.
Question: How do you evaluate cost when you select services?
Pillar: Cost Optimization (Code: COST)
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