AWS Instances Affect Your Bottom Line – Here’s How

There are many factors that have the potential to affect your company’s bottom line. When it comes to AWS, one of the factors that you need to consider will be instances, which are essentially computer capacities. It is important to keep in mind that there are many different types of instances across all of the Amazon Web Services. Different types of instances will have different prices associated with them, and that means they will have an effect on how much you are spending, naturally.

Therefore, it is very important that you are able to choose the instance that will suit your needs and workload the best. When you are determining the instances that you should be purchasing, whether they are on-demand, reserved instances, or spot instances, for example, you always want to consider your processes and needs. Think about the workload you have and the amount of memory that you believe you will require when you are making a choice.

In addition, you will want to consider tagging your instances. This will let you more easily monitor the cost per hour of running the systems. When you calculate this information with the use of tags, it can help the development team to better optimize the costs.

For some companies that are looking to save some money, it might be a good idea to consider on-demand, Reserved Instances or Spot Instances over an AWS managed service. These are very different, but they can both be quite beneficial. Let’s take a look at each.

With this option, you will have a virtual machine that is paid for by the hour, and the machine will stay up and running as long as the hardware is working. When you need instances, they are always there for you. While this is beneficial, it does tend to mean that you will end up paying more for the services, and you could even be paying for what you aren’t using.

With a reserved instance, you will have a machine that is essentially on a contract. You can buy the machine for one, two, or three years, and it can run around the clock during that time. You will find that this can provide you with a substantial amount of savings, and the savings do tend to be higher for longer-term contracts. However, you do need think about the type of business you are running to make sure that the longer-term contracts would make sense for you.

Spot instances are another good option, and with these, there is another great shot at saving a substantial amount of money. In some cases, it is possible to save around 60% when compared with on-demand costs. With spot instances, you are purchasing by the hour and on the spot. While this could be a good option, it is also possible for Amazon to bring these machines down without any warning.

Of course, if you need persistent storage through the cloud, it will also affect your costs. As you can see, there are many factors that will affect your bottom line, and instances are a major part of them.