Cost Optimization

Per Second Billing for EC2 and EBS

On September 18th, 2017, [Amazon announced] (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-per-second-billing-for-ec2-instances-and-ebs-volumes/) that effective October 2nd, 2017 all Linux-based EC2 instances running as On-Demand, Reserved or Spot, as well as provisioned storage for EBS volumes, will be billed in one-second increments; per-second billing also applies to Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) and AWS Batch jobs.

Elastic Map Reduce (EMR)

With the ability to add more machines to the cluster, jobs can be completed sooner and will be more cost-effective.

What Are Reserved Instances and When Should You Use Them

What is a ‘Reserved Instance (RI)’

I explain reserved instances to customers quite simply - Reserved Instances (RI) are a billing function. In exchange for making a time-based commitment to Amazon Web Services (AWS), you get a discount for your Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and Relational Database Service (RDS). It’s important to know that while other services also support reserved instances, EC2 and RDS are the two I most commonly talk to customers about because typically the account for the majority of your AWS bill.

Three Things You Can Do Now To Save Money in AWS

For the majority of AWS customer EC2 costs make up the largest part of their monthly spending - sometimes as high as 70 - 75%. That’s why it makes sense to carefully examine how your EC2 instances are being used and look for ways to optimize your AWS EC2 costs.

In this article, I outline three of the most common methods I see customers use to help them reduce their monthly EC2 costs.