Cleaning House with CloudCheckr

Transitioning to the cloud can be an ordeal. In many ways it’s similar to moving into a new home. Weeks or even months later some boxes still haven’t gotten unpacked and the furniture may even be where you first set it down. This is no big deal in a house, but in the cloud it could be costing you money.

CloudCheckr’s best practices checks will help you put your house in order.

One of our customers joined AWS a while back and opened up an account of M1, EC2 instances. As these M1 instances served the purpose of the company, it went unaltered.

Now there are many demands on a manager’s time and energy resources. The M1 instances served the needs of the company, therefore having plenty of other pressing matters, the instances fell into the “ain’t broke, don’t fix” category.

Meanwhile, Amazon has come out with cheaper and more powerful versions of its infrastructure in M2, then M3, and now M4. The relative cost of those EC2 instances has skyrocketed.

CloudCheckr’s best practices checks helped rectify this. Our customer saved $38,000 by following our upgrade advice.
In the above example, the company’s Reserved Instances were serving a purpose, just not at the right cost. Another issue is instances that serve no purpose at all.

This can be tied back to neglect as well. Moving to the cloud is such a radical shift, that it’s easy to error along the way. With everything happening at once, a company’s IT team may just create a little too much capacity, or perhaps build up and then forget about projects.

Months can go by without a single person logging into particular instances. These RIs become little more than charges passed through to your credit card. CloudCheckr recognizes when the needle isn’t moving on RI usage or when there are multiple charges across different departments. We will recommend what services to cut.

In one case, we saved a company $20,000 by spotting their under-utilized instances.

As CloudCheckr co-founder Aaron Newman says, “if you can’t measure something, you can’t control it.” AWS provides the necessary data, we translate and organize it, giving you control.

Learn more about how CloudCheckr can help manage spend and allocate costs.