COST 10: How do you evaluate new services?
As AWS releases new services and features, it's a best practice to review your existing architectural decisions to ensure they continue to be the
most cost effective.
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Develop a workload review process: Develop a process that defines the criteria and process for workload review. The review effort should reflect potential benefit: for example, core workloads or workloads with a value of over 10% of the bill are reviewed quarterly, while workloads below 10% are reviewed annually.
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Review and analyze this workload regularly: Existing workloads are regularly reviewed as per defined processes.
Improvement Plan
Develop a workload review process
Define review frequency : Define how frequently the workload and its components should be reviewed. This is a combination of factors and may differ from
workload to workload within your organization, it may also differ between components in the workload. Common factors include: the importance to the organization
measured in terms of revenue or brand, the total cost of running the workload (including operation and resource costs), the complexity of the workload, how easy is it to implement a change, any software licensing agreements, and if
a change would incur significant increases in licensing costs due to punitive licensing. Components can be defined functionally or technically, such as web servers and databases, or
compute and storage resources. Balance the factors accordingly
and develop a period for the workload and its components. You may decide to review the full workload every 18 months, review the web servers every 6 months, the
database every 12 months, compute and short term storage every 6months, and long term
storage every 12 months.
Define review thoroughness : Define how much effort is spent on the review of the workload or workload components. Similar to the review frequency this is a balance of multiple
factors. You may decide to spend 1 week of analysis on the database component, and 4 hours for storage reviews.
Review and analyze this workload regularly
Regularly review the workload : Using your defined process, perform reviews with the frequency specified. Ensure
you spend the correct amount of effort on each component. This process would be similar to the initial design process where you selected services
for cost optimization. Analyze the services and the benefits they would bring, this
time factor in the cost of making the change, not just the long term benefits.
Implement new services : If the outcome of the analysis is to implement changes, first perform a baseline
of the workload to know the current cost per output. Implement the changes, then perform an analysis to confirm the new cost per output.
