Tech Tip: AWS Cost vs Control

The AWS cloud is a great option to control costs, but it doesn’t mean that all the options available to you are equally cost-efficient.

Amazon is always upgrading its services, down to the presentation of the management console, depending on how far back you have been a client.

Considering that EC2 is one of the most frequently used services on the platform, here’s a tip to lower the cost of maintaining it.

Less Costly and Less Control

If your account was created on or after the latter days of 2013, the only choice of a network platform that you have to host your EC2 instance is the EC2-VPC.

Not many people were happy with that decision, but it was done with the intention to consolidate services within that Virtual Private Cloud. In turn, that saves you money.

More Costly But More Control

On the other hand, the old EC2 classic VPC costs more, because some of the servers and services that you want to establish have to be connected to it. By default, the newer EC2-VPC automatically configures those AWS services within the same network.

If the original VPC is your choice, be sure to do these three things:

• Create the EC2 instance, and in step 3, select the classic VPC.

• Go to the VPC menu, and add the public DNS setting. This is one of the steps that’s “done for you” in the newer platform.
• When allocating an elastic IP address (EIP), select VPC-Classic as your network platform.

Share Your Tips

Scalability with the AWS cloud is far more than an organization could accomplish with its own infrastructure. But companies are always looking to cut costs wherever possible. The smaller you can keep that footprint, the more money you can save, and reinvest in the business and its people.

If you have other cost-saving tips with AWS, please comment, and share this article!