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AWS Compute Costs

Glean extensively uses compute resources to run various workloads, and purchasing a savings plan can help reduce compute costs. Glean recommends Savings Plans over Reserved Instances, as the former is an AWS preference. Reference: Reserved Instances for Amazon EC2 overview—Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. To purchase a savings plan, you can follow: Purchasing a custom Savings Plan commitment
  1. In step 3, select “Compute Savings Plan”
  2. To find the hourly commitment, Glean recommends to follow these steps:
    1. Find the AWS recommended hourly commitment for the “Compute Savings Plan” based on usage for the last 30 days. Reference: Customizing Savings Plans recommendations
    2. Glean recommends customers to commit only for 70% of the AWS recommended hourly commitment because we actively work on reducing compute spend for our customers. Hence, you can multiply the value from above by 0.7 to arrive at the final hourly commitment.
    Example: if in step 2a, AWS recommends an hourly commitment of $3/hour, we recommend you to go with $2.1/hour (0.7 * $3/hour).
    1. You can use the “Savings Plan Purchase Analyzer” to get insights on estimated savings for the hourly commitment. Reference: Announcing Savings Plans Purchase Analyzer | AWS Cloud Financial Management

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AWS RDS Database Costs

Glean Cloud Prem deployments utilize Amazon RDS for database workloads. AWS now offers Savings Plans for Amazon RDS, which can help reduce database costs. Glean recommends Database Savings Plans as a way to achieve significant cost savings on predictable RDS usage. To purchase an RDS Savings Plan, follow the AWS guide Purchasing a custom Savings Plan commitment and select Database Saving Plans.

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Calculate your commitment

  1. To find the hourly commitment, Glean recommends to follow these steps:
    1. Find the AWS recommended hourly commitment for the Database Savings Plan based on usage for the last 30 days. For more information, see Customizing Savings Plans recommendations.
    2. Glean recommends customers to commit for 80% of the AWS recommended hourly commitment. RDS workloads in Glean deployments tend to be more stable than compute workloads, allowing for a higher commitment level. Hence, you can multiply the value from above by 0.8 to arrive at the final hourly commitment. For example, if AWS recommends an hourly commitment of $2/hour, we recommend you to go with $1.6/hour (0.8 * $2/hour).
    3. You can use Savings Plan Purchase Analyzer to get insights on estimated savings for the hourly commitment. For more information, see Announcing Savings Plans Purchase Analyzer | AWS Cloud Financial Management.

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AWS Config Costs

AWS Config is an AWS feature for keeping an inventory of AWS resources and tracking their changes over time. Config is billed based on the quantity of configuration changes that are recorded. AWS Config is not required by Glean and can be disabled. AWS Config may be part of your organization’s overall AWS policy, so it may be applied to the Glean environment as well. By keeping AWS Config enabled, the customer is choosing to bear the additional AWS costs not required or scoped by Glean.
  • Many resources in the Glean deployment change frequently, so if not tuned, a customer may see an expensive AWS Config bill.
  • To reduce costs, but still maintain the value that Config provides, Glean recommends that customers set AWS Config to:
    Record all resources except these:
    • AWS::Config::ResourceCompliance
    • AWS::EC2::EIP
    • AWS::EC2::Instance
    • AWS::EC2::NetworkInterface
    • AWS::EC2::Volume
    • AWS::SSM::AssociationCompliance
    • AWS::SSM::ManagedInstanceInventory
    • AWS::SSM::PatchCompliance
  • Notes:
    • These resources can be noisy and often don’t provide significant value in recording critical configuration change history. Ignoring the resources above should significantly reduce AWS Config costs.
    • There may be additional noisy resources that a CloudWatch dashboard should help identify. If desired, create a CloudWatch dashboard using the following to identify the noisiest AWS resources that Config records (ensure that the region below is updated with the region of Glean deployment):
{
    "widgets": [
        {
            "type": "metric",
            "x": 0,
            "y": 0,
            "width": 6,
            "height": 6,
            "properties": {
                "metrics": [
                    [ { "expression": "SORT(SEARCH('{AWS/Config,ResourceType} MetricName=\"ConfigurationItemsRecorded\" NOT ResourceType=\"All\"',\"Sum\",86400),MAX, DESC, 10)", "label": "Config", "id": "config" } ]
                ],
                "view": "timeSeries",
                "stacked": false,
                "region": "ADD-REGION-HERE",
                "stat": "Average",
                "period": 300,
                "start": "-PT672H",
                "title": "Config resource types"
            }
        }
    ]
}