A little while ago, I was asked by a customer to help them lower their Amazon Web Services monthly spend.  They were currently spending about $8,000 per month, and set an internal goal to get that down to $7,000 in 30 days, and to $6,000 in 60 days.

At first glance, there was no easy fix.  Cost optimization tools are great for finding under-utilized servers, unattached volumes, and other clear opportunities to save.  But this customer was in decent shape. No server sprawl driving up costs, and although there was a significant amount of high performance block storage, nothing looked completely out of bounds.

After digging through the monthly bill on a day to day basis, and group by API call we were able to find a great opportunity to save money.  Although the customer was utilizing all of the services they had provisioned, there was a better way.  By changing type of storage for few of the volumes on some of their critical servers, we were able to decrease the bill by about $1,500 / month, achieving most of the 60 day cost optimization goal in about 15 minutes.

We do this all the time, for all of our customers. The reason this is possible is because we have context.  Analytics tools are critical for us to do our job, but do not stand alone.  We understand the application, the performance requirements, and the business impact to our customers if resources are overburdened. We can also offer alternative architectures which accomplish the same result for a lower price.

Foghorn offers monthly operations reviews for all of our platform customers at no additional cost. We take the best practices learned across our customer base, and apply them in context to your application and your business requirements.  

If you want more for less, talk to us about the benefits of working with a certified AWS Consulting Partner and Channel Reseller.