Welcome to another episode of 'Back to Basics'. I am Bhavisha Dawada, a Solutions Architect here at Amazon Web Services.
In this episode, we are going to talk about how you can reduce the cost of your Elastic Cloud Compute
(EC2) and Relational Database Service (RDS) instances by automatically scheduling the start and stop of those instances.
Before we dive into the architecture, let's look at some common use cases.
Let's say an organization like yours would like to stop graphic intensive resources outside of the working schedule,
or a testing team at your organization would like to stop RDS instances outside of there testing schedule.
You can achieve this by using a variety of AWS services.
Let's look at an end-to-end architecture by using Amazon DynamoDB
and AWS Lambda to configure start and stop of your EC2 and RDS instances.
You first define a tag key to identify applicable Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS instances.
You then define an Amazon DynamoDB table that contains the schedule information.
For example, define a schedule for Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm.
AWS Lambda, which is an event driven serverless compute platform will retrieve the schedule that's defined in an Amazon DynamoDB table
and perform the appropriate action of stopping or starting the instances.
You can set up an CloudWatch event to run at a customer defined interval.
This event invokes the AWS Lambda function.
Optionally, you can set up Simple Notification Service (SNS) to receive notification when an action is performed.
Now that you understand how to reduce operational costs using individual AWS services like AWS Lambda and Amazon Dynamo DB,
building your own solution with individual services requires you to configure multiple services and manage the deployment.
Often customers ask me is there an easy way to deploy an end-to-end solution?
And yes, AWS Solutions is an open source library to help you build faster with the AWS platform.
If you use the analogy of building a car, rather than buying the wheel, the door, the engine, you prefer buying a prebuilt car.
Think of solutions just like this prebuilt car with customization capabilities,
where you can use solutions as is or with minor customization.
AWS Instance Scheduler is an example of a solution offered in the AWS Solutions library.
AWS Instance Scheduler can help you reduce costs of your Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS instances
by automatically starting and stopping instances using a scheduled configuration.
You can deploy Instant Scheduler using the solutions implementation guide, and the accompanying AWS CloudFormation Template.
The CloudFormation template launches, configures, and runs the AWS services
required to deploy the solution using AWS best practices for security and availability.
One thing to note, you are responsible for the cost of AWS services while running AWS Instance Scheduler.
In this episode, you learned how you can reduce the cost of Amazon EC2 or Amazon RDS instances
by either building your own solution using AWS services
or using a prebuilt solution called Instant Scheduler from the AWS Solutions library.
For more information, check out the links below. Thank you for watching, 'Back to Basics' and see you next time.