Amazon Web Services (AWS) forever changed the world of IT when it entered the market in 2006 offering services for pennies on the dollar. While its prices have come down significantly over the years, many companies learned the hard way that moving to the public cloud didn’t always achieve the cost savings they expected.

In fact, organizations have frequently noticed public cloud bills two to three times higher than expectations. This doesn’t mean that moving to the public cloud is a mistake. The public cloud provides huge benefits in agility, responsiveness, simplified operation, and improved innovation but the reality of the cloud is that costs steadily rise over time, and without clear insight into what drives your spend, strategic cost reduction is impossible.

In this book, you will learn the 10 best practices for reducing spend in AWS, so you can start optimizing your cloud for spend and performance today.

Cloud adoption is booming. Gartner estimates that spending on cloud services grew 6 percent in 2020 to a total market value of $257.9 billion. While there are several large public cloud players, Amazon Web Services (AWS) remains the largest, with 45 percent of the market share for Infrastructure-as-a-Service, and more than 1 million active users.

But, even with an estimated 91 percent of organizations now using a public cloud, many lack the bandwidth, internal resources, and expertise to properly manage their infrastructure. Aspects like monitoring, proactive improvements, and cost optimization typically require substantial legwork that may occupy engineers and pull them away from core business initiatives.

Without the right resources and expertise, managing your own AWS infrastructure can lead to:

• Costly outages due to hard-to-use monitoring tools.
• Never achieving a proactive approach.
• Overpaying for cloud services.