AWS regularly cuts customer cost by reducing the price of their services. This happened most recently with the price reduction of C4, M4 and R3 instances. These instances saw a 5% price cut when running on Linux. This was their 51st price reduction. Customers are clearly benefiting from the scale that AWS can bring to the market. Spot Instances and Reserved Instances are another way customers can significantly reduce the cost to run their workloads in the cloud.
Sometimes these cost savings are not as obvious, but they need to be understood and measured when doing a TCO calculation. AWS recently announced Certificate Manager. Certificate Manager allows you to request new SSL/TLS certificates and then manage them with automated renewals. The best part is that the service is free! Many vendors charge hundreds of dollars for new certificates, and AWS is now offering it for free. The automated renewal could also save you time and money while preventing costly outages. Just ask the folks over at Microsoft how costly a certificate expiring can be.
Another way AWS reduces the cost to manage workloads is by offering new features in an existing service. S3 Standard – Infrequent Access is an example of this. AWS offered the same eleven 9s of durability while reducing availability from four 9s to three. Customers who are comfortable going from 52 minutes of downtime a year to 8.5 hours of downtime per year for objects that don’t need the same level of availability can save well over 50%, even at the highest usage levels. When you add features like encryption, versioning, cross-region replications and others, you start to see the true value. Building and configuring these features yourself in a private cloud or in your own infrastructure can be costly add-ons. AWS often offers these add-ons for free or only charges for the associated use, like the storage cost for cross-region replication.
Look beyond CPUs, memory, and bytes on disk when calculating the savings you will get with a move to AWS. Explore the features and services you cannot offer your business from within your own datacenter or colocation facility. Find a partner like 2nd Watch to help you manage and optimize your cloud infrastructure for long-term savings.
-Chris Nolan, Director of Product
