UPDATED 15:10 EDT / AUGUST 27 2012

A Closer Look at AWS Efficiency: Is Your Cloud Working Smarter or Harder?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) dominates the public cloud computing space, commanding more than 60 percent of market share and over one trillion data objects stored.  But being accustomed to physical products whose installation and operation are traditionally managed and monitored within the AWS data centers, the concept of behind the scenes of AWS usage for many of us is still a mystery.

Newvem, a company that enhances cloud usage effectiveness through data analytics, and Visual.ly, the rapidly growing community of infographics and data visualizations, revealed an infographic based on analysis from Newvem’s Reserved Instance Decision Making Tool.  It looks at the behind the scenes usage of AWS services, and sheds light on moving on-demand instances to reserved instances that can help customers to save time and money.

AWS Cloud Infrastructure

According to the report, AWS currently operates a whopping 450,000 physical servers. The US-East is its biggest data center region with about 5030 server racks, and the company added about 110 server racks each month between Aug 2011 and Feb 2012. Amazon also operates server racks in US west (630), UE east (814), AP northeast (314) and SA east (246).

Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances

Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances allow you to retain the benefit of elastic computing while reducing costs and maintaining your reserve capacity. The instances provide a complete environment, a processor, memory, different flavors of operating systems and preconfigured software.

Newvem’s Reserved Instance Decision Making Tool analyzed AWS usage and found that significant amount of instances are not being used and remain idle.

For example, heavy AWS usage customers used a total of 10,651 hundreds of instances, but customers buy the computation time for a given period and then don’t use those instances.  More than 36 percent of heavy user instances remain idle, representing a loss of $2.6 million. The three types of customers – heavy, advanced, and beginners – are simply not using more than 5985 instances (38 percent), which provides them an opportunity to increase efficiency and save cost.

But according to the report, the good news is that AWS’s reserved instances can offer 35 to 50 percent in potential cost savings by indicating exactly how many on-demand instances should move to reserved instances, and calculating how many reserved instances purchases are and alerting when they are about to expire, working smarter not harder. About 80 percent would benefit from cost savings by making the right reserved instance option.

Reserved Instances gaining popularity

The infographic suggested that 40 percent of AWS users that have cloud solutions benefit from an immediate move of on-demand instances to reserved instances with a cost saving of 35 to 50 percent.

Newvem found that on an average, 20 percent of reserved instances are under-utilized or not being used effectively. Moreover, the company scanned almost 16,000 server instances for AWS users that use up to thousands of virtual servers and found over $6 million in potential savings.

Amazon recently introduced new affordable, slow moving AWS Glacier storage service solution designed as a means of improving cost allocation by low-performance, high-durability cloud storage offering.


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