What Is AWS Sizing? 10+ Best Practices And Tips

Organizations moving to the cloud often prioritize speed and performance, overlooking the importance of AWS sizing. At first, Amazon’s pay-as-you-go pricing seems manageable, but as companies grow and add more to the cloud, they see the downside of ignoring sizing. Overprovisioned instances lead to spending on resources that aren’t used.

This guide focuses on AWS sizing, its benefits, and why it matters. It provides practical tips and best practices to help optimize costs effectively. With the right approach to AWS sizing, companies can use cloud resources efficiently, avoiding unnecessary expenses and getting the most from their cloud spend.

What Is AWS Sizing? (Right Sizing)

Also known as right sizing, AWS sizing is an effective procedure for controlling cloud costs. Right sizing aligns AWS instance sizes to your workload needs and performance, minimizing costs. 

AWS sizing assesses deployed instances to reduce cloud spending. It downsizes or removes extra resources without impacting workload capacity. 

The process itself is usually continuous, as AWS users’ resource needs are always shifting. Sizing monitors performance, usage patterns, and workload needs. It then terminates inactive instances. 

This elimination of overprovisioned resources allows you to match costs to your actual service usage and needs.

Why Is Right Sizing Important?

Right sizing became necessary because of one huge mistake that most organizations make as they migrate to the cloud. They often allocate too many cloud resources, assuming their on-premise infrastructure is well-balanced. 

Organizations transfer inefficiencies to the cloud by replicating wasteful on-site infrastructure. As such, they end up raking in losses from the extra costs that pile up due to underutilized and unused cloud resources. 

TSO Logic, an APN and Migration Competency partner of AWS, analyzed this event with a statistical analysis. The analysis sampled almost 105,000 operating system instances in North America.

 The report revealed that only 16% of the OS instances were appropriately provisioned for their workloads. 84% of the rest ran on larger footprints. This could lead to significant losses if directly replicated to the cloud. 

The research analyzed the effect of right sizing on real-world usage scenarios. 

As it turns out, organizations would have been able to reduce their AWS spend by 36% through optimally sized resources. This means that right sizing alone would have cumulatively saved them more than $55 million per year. 

That’s the power of AWS sizing. Optimize your instances to retain only necessary resources. This can save your organization a lot of wasted cloud spend. 

11 Actionable AWS Right Sizing Tips

Right sizing isn’t a basic plug-and-play procedure. You don’t just randomly hit a button on AWS and wait for the system to sort everything out. 

To achieve optimal results in resource optimization and cost control, you need to strategically align the right data and approach for sizing. Here are 11 tips and best practices that can help you rightsize your instances.

1. Use a cloud cost intelligence solution

To make informed decisions on rightsizing for savings, start with complete cost visibility.

Engineering teams can use CloudZero to gain visibility into their cloud spend. They can see the costs of AWS services and understand the reasons behind them. They can also analyze cost data from a high level down to individual components. Engineers can see the impact of their work and how specific code changes affect their costs.

Additionally, having a team that can help you spot cost optimization opportunities, can help you feel assured that you’re on the right track. CloudZero’s Cost Intelligence Team helps by monitoring your spend, coaching on best practices, assessing infrastructure, and offering cost-saving recommendations.

If your engineering team prioritizes right sizing, ensure you have a cost intelligence platform. This platform will help you make informed cost decisions.

2. Review your AWS performance data

AWS sizing means adjusting cloud resources to match workload needs without performance loss. As such, it’s only right to start the optimization process with the one thing that lies at the center of it all — the performance of the cloud resources. 

If you’re planning to rightsize your cloud infrastructure, then you should assess and keep tabs on your cloud service utilization. This will show you the performance trends. You can identify underutilized instances.

That said, the approach here is straightforward. Monitor your cloud performance over a period of at least 14 days while, at the same time, keeping an eye on the corresponding workloads. 

Review instance performance metrics like disk use, network, memory, and vCPU. Pay close attention to any instances with maximum memory and CPU usage of less than 40%. Eliminate those to reduce costs. 

3. Take note of your usage needs

Closely tied to instance performance is usage needs. Track your cloud resources performance and monitor their utilization patterns and needs. This will ultimately help you establish the ideal AWS sizing options for each use case. 

This is particularly important for users who have difficulties picking the ideal mix of instance types and features. 

Case in point, Amazon EC2, which tends to be the costliest cloud solution for typical AWS users, offers a wide range of resource options. You’ll find a host of memory, network I/O, and CPU options — which, combined, might understandably feel overwhelming. 

To avoid shooting in the dark, you should understand your usage needs well. This is what will ultimately define the best type of instances for your cloud infrastructure. 

If your cloud operations need faster network speeds, choose Network-Optimized Instances. Memory-Optimized Instances suit memory-intensive workloads. Compute-Optimized Instances are ideal for CPU-intensive operations. 

If your workload level is consistent and predictable, you could save significantly with Reserved Instances. Variable workloads with predictable changing patterns, on the other hand, would benefit from AWS Auto Scaling. 

4. Identify and do away with idle resources

AWS sizing is incomplete until you eliminate idle resources from your cloud infrastructure and usage bill. Always monitor your cloud environment for unused purchases. 

One scenario might leave you with idle resources. Consider On-Demand deployment for non-production operations. Examples include testing, staging, development, and quality assurance. Such instances are often used for a limited period of time, after which they’re abandoned to lie idle as costs accumulate. 

You should promptly identify and remove these types of resources from your cloud environment. 

Make no mistake about it, though. Simply stopping an Amazon EC2 instance doesn’t count since it would leave all attached Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes running. You can restore the instance later, but Amazon will keep charging you for the EBS volumes. 

To avoid that, fully terminate the instance. This action will delete everything, including the attached EBS. 

5. Maintain continuous AWS sizing

Right sizing is not a one-time engagement, as cloud workloads tend to run continuously under variable parameters and needs. 

Eliminate underutilized resources. Expect status quo to change with service demands.

With that in mind, you should schedule your AWS sizing to run as frequently as possible. Rightsize the resources during migration. Proceed to track relevant usage, performance, and cost parameters. This allows you to respond to changing workload demands with appropriate AWS sizing.  

6. Take advantage of AWS Auto Scaling

One Amazon feature that you might find particularly helpful when it comes to right sizing is AWS Auto Scaling. 

This feature monitors your application’s capacity demands and adjusts cloud resources. It is designed for cloud application scaling. 

That’s not all. Configure AWS Auto Scaling to scale resources across multiple apps and services in one step. This procedure takes only a couple of minutes. During this time, optimize your cloud services’ performance and costs. 

AWS Auto Scaling is suitable for applications with steady usage and occasional fluctuations. It can expand and scale down your Amazon EC2 instance capacity in response to traffic fluctuations. 

Instead of getting unused on-demand instances, rely on AWS Auto Scaling. Users just need to run it on Reserved Instances — which, according to Amazon, are up to 72% cheaper than On-Demand Instances. 

7. Migrate between instance families

AWS sizing isn’t always about terminating instances. While that’s the standard approach, an Amazon instance can still be right sized by moving to a different model within the same instance family. 

And it doesn’t stop there—you could also choose to transfer to another instance family. These are all acceptable AWS sizing strategies. Working within the same instance family is simpler than shifting between different families. 

If you choose the former option, consider basic Amazon EC2 instance parameters: ephemeral storage, network throughput, memory, and vCPU. 

A user can split the EC2 instance in half if their memory and CPU usage stay below 40% for four weeks. That would mean migrating from, say, a c4.8xlarge EC2 to a c4.4xlarge EC2  — which would translate to savings of $190 for every 10 days. 

Ensure compatibility in platform, network, and virtualization type for migrations between different instance families. 

8. Consider reserved instances and savings plans

Reserved Instances and Savings Plans require a commitment of one or three years in advance. They are significantly cheaper than On-Demand Instances. Amazon states Reserved Instances can be discounted up to 72%. This makes them a valuable right-sizing option. 

Once you understand your workload capacity and utilization patterns, you can forecast future usage levels and determine the necessary cloud resources. 

You can easily calculate the right amount of Reserved Instances to buy and the benefits of Amazon Savings Plans. 

All these are thoughtful ways of right sizing your cloud resources to minimize the costs. 

9. Try out spot instances

Spot Instance is another favorably priced instance type that you might want to consider when sizing your AWS account. 

The cost benefits here are potentially immense, as Spot Instances happen to be even cheaper than Reserved Instances. According to Amazon, you could purchase them for up to 90% less than their On-Demand counterparts. 

If you choose to proceed, you’ll notice that Spot Instances come as unused EC2 instances. The only problem is, in the event such an instance is required at an on-demand rate, you’ll only get a two minutes notice to migrate your workloads. 

On a brighter note, however, while this whole arrangement disqualifies Spot Instances for mission-critical workloads, you can still use them for machine learning, continuous integration and delivery, big data analytics, testing, and many other operations. 

10. Leverage AWS sizing tools

Don’t go at it alone. Although it’s possible to perform AWS sizing manually, the best service optimization results come from combining best practices with advanced right sizing tools. 

These are software solutions developed to optimize cloud resource usage and minimize corresponding service costs. 

The good thing is, you don’t even have to search far and wide. Amazon itself offers, among other features, these three solid tools that you’ll find to be very helpful in your AWS sizing: 

You don’t have to restrict yourself to Amazon’s native tools. Thanks to its API integrations, AWS now supports a range of similar third-party solutions. These solutions specialize in usage tracking, cost management, resource monitoring, and infrastructure optimization. 

11. Maintain the analytics framework after AWS sizing

The analytics framework that you managed to put up doesn’t become useless after AWS sizing. If your first few right sizing attempts turned out to be successful, that’s great — but, don’t get carried away by the temporary victory. There’s still so much more to come, and you’ll need all the AWS intelligence you can find. 

By now, your company has probably had a good taste of the sheer power of AWS, and the performance benefits that come with it. So, chances are, you’re in this for the long haul. Your organization will probably keep expanding its AWS footprint for the foreseeable future. 

As such, you can bet that AWS sizing will always be integral to your cloud services. That alone should be reason enough to keep your AWS analytics framework running at all times.

Please note, however, that right sizing is not easy. The larger your infrastructure grows, the harder it will be to monitor your resources, usage patterns, performance metrics, and service costs. 

That’s how companies ultimately find themselves drowning in huge AWS losses—usually in the form of extra costs and wasted spending. This is especially true if companies don’t have a solution that gives them complete visibility into their cloud costs.

CloudZero shows engineering teams the cost impact of their work on AWS services. They can discover which services cost the most and why. Teams can also drill down to see the components driving their spend.

CloudZero’s Cost Intelligence Team provides customized cost-saving tips and helps you optimize your expenses. The hardest part of any initiative can be figuring out where to start, but CloudZero is here to remove any uncertainty you may have while helping you get started fast.

to see how CloudZero can help you gain cloud cost visibility. Make informed right sizing decisions to reduce spend and optimize costs.

Frequently Asked Questions AWS Sizing

Why is AWS Sizing important for cloud cost optimization?

Many organizations mistakenly overprovision cloud resources, leading to unnecessary costs. AWS Sizing ensures you pay only for needed resources. Customers report savings up to 36% on AWS expenses.

How often should I perform AWS Sizing?

Given that cloud workloads and resource needs constantly evolve, AWS Sizing should be an ongoing process. Review and adjust your AWS resource allocation often. This ensures optimal performance and cost efficiency.

Can AWS Auto Scaling help with right sizing?

AWS Auto Scaling adjusts your resource levels based on actual usage. This helps maintain performance and minimizes costs. It’s effective for applications with variable demand. You won’t pay for unused resources.

How can I start with AWS Right Sizing?

Begin by assessing your current cloud resource usage and needs. CloudZero provides customized insights and recommendations to help you optimize your AWS infrastructure.

What are the challenges of AWS Sizing?

AWS Sizing presents challenges: understanding cloud pricing, forecasting future needs, monitoring resource usage. Organizations need to balance performance, availability, and cost efficiency. This balance requires understanding current and future computing needs. To overcome these challenges, use analytical tools and adopt best cloud management practices.

How does cloud cost management integrate with AWS Sizing?

Cloud cost management includes AWS Sizing. It involves tracking, analyzing, and optimizing cloud spend across all services and resources. Cloud cost management aligns AWS Sizing with financial goals. This helps prevent overspending while meeting cloud needs. 

Organizations can use AWS Sizing to improve cloud expense management. This helps in making informed decisions and forecasting expenses accurately. It also leads to achieving greater cost savings.

Author: Cody Slingerland

Cody Slingerland, a FinOps certified practitioner, is an avid content creator with over 10 years of experience creating content for SaaS and technology companies. Cody collaborates with internal team members and subject matter experts to create expert-written content on the CloudZero blog.