A lecture for SRE, DevOps and FinOps teams on controlling AWS costs with optimizations and practical tips from practice.
Since the presentation is in german, here are the key topics written down in this blogpost
Download the PowerPoint here: AWS Community Days 2020 - cost-optimisation
There are mainly 3 factors that make up your Lambda costs: the number of executions, the duration of each execution and the memory allocated to the function.
It is a good incentive to write efficient code in order to shorten the duration of each execution and therefore pay less for your Lambda. By automating, monitoring and eventually getting professional expertise you're already on a good path to FinDev.
Read more about Cutting down the cost on your Lambda.
AWS Kubernetes
Auto-scaling, right sizing, down-scaling and optimizing instance price by replacing on-demand with spot instances are your best friends here.
A requirement for cost-optimization in a Kubernetes cluster is having a Cluster Autoscaler running, it monitors the cluster for pods that are unable to run and detects nodes that have been underutilized.
After having a Cluster Autoscaler running you can be sure of the instance-hours being in line with the requirements of the pods in the cluster.
With the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler you are able to scale out or in the number of pods based on specific metrics, optimize pod hours and further optimize instance-hours but in order for it to work you have to ensure that the Kubernetes metrics server is deployed.
The combination of Cluster Autoscaler and Horizontal Pod Autoscaler is an effective way to keep EC2 Instance-hours tied as close as possible to actual utilization of the workloads running in the cluster.
Example HPA Configuration:
apiVersion: autoscaling/v1
kind: HorizontalPodAutoscaler
metadataL
name: nginx-ingress-controller
spec:
scaleTargetRef:
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
name: nginx-ingress-controller
minReplicas: 1
maxreplicas: 5
targetCPUUtilizationPercentage: 80
Right Size your Pods
Set the resources allocated for the containers in your pods. Requests should align as close as possible to the actual utilization. If the value is too low containers may throttle resources, if it's too high you're having unused resourced which you still pay for. "Slack costs" are described as when the actual utilization which is lower than the requested value.
Scale in and out the deployments based on time of day with the kube-downscaler in your cluster
A default uptime can configured via an environment variable
Individual namespaces and deployments can override their uptime
Spot Instances have a significantly lower cost, for example a m5.large
instance is consistently 50-60% less expensive than using On-Demand.
Run a Termination Handler tool, e.g.
Determine the termination workflow by...
Sagemaker offers various instance families. Each family is optimized for a different application which means they have to be analyzed to fit your usecase but remember that not all instance types are suitable for inference jobs.
Another option to lower GPU instance- and inference cost is utilizing Elastic Inference which can achieve you up to 75% of cost-saving and is available for EC2 and SageMaker Notebook & Endpoints. The downside of this is a 10-15% slower performance.
With the automatic scaling for SageMaker you can add capacity or accelerated instances to your endpoints automatically when needed instead of monitoring the inference volume manually and changing endpoint configurations as a reaction to this. The endpoint adjusts the needed instances automatically to the actual workload.
Certain SageMaker resources, for example instances for processing-training, tuning and batch-transformation are ephemeral, meaning SageMaker will start them automatically and stop them when the job is done.
Other resources, for example build-computing or hosting endpoints, are not ephemeral and the user has control over when to start or stop those resources. This knowledge of how unused resources can be identified or stopped can lead to a better cost-optimizati