Rightsizing for AWS S3

You can use the Rightsizing dashboard to view the resource optimization recommendations for Amazon Web Services (AWS)Simple Storage Service (S3). The dashboard shows both the rightsizing and idle (terminate) recommendations. You can view the recommendations across multiple accounts from a single dashboard.

Rightsizing in Cloudability

AWS S3 overview

Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 is a storage service that is organized around buckets. The buckets are top-level containers. You can use these buckets to store individual objects that are associated with a storage class and also organize individual objects hierarchically within folders.

Buckets

You can have up to one thousand buckets per account. Within each bucket, you can store up to five terabytes of individual objects. Costs are incurred at the rate for the object’s storage class and factor by the allocated storage space (GB per month), duration, number of operations (read, write, lists, delete), and volume of data transferred (egress).

Storage Classes

Storage classes are tailored based on access patterns and durability needs, ranging from frequent to infrequent (archival) storage. Only an object, not a bucket, is associated with a storage class.

The AWS S3 storage classes differ in price, performance, availability, and minimum size and duration requirements. Depending on the storage class you use, addition fees can be incurred for monitoring, storage class transitioning, early delete, and restoration fees.

By default, S3 objects are created in the highest-priced Standard storage class. To manually optimize individual objects, you need to identify the rates for each storage class by region, collect the past access patterns and operations, then evaluate each of the alternatives considering all the trade-offs.

Before you begin

To view the AWS S3 dashboard, make sure that you have connected Cloudability to the correct AWS accounts.

Connect Amazon Web Services

Access the AWS S3 dashboard

To access the AWS EC2 dashboard, open the Cloudability home page, and from the left navigation menu, select Optimize > Rightsizing . On the Rightsizing page, select the AWS tab, and then select the S3 subtab.

Each day Cloudability analyzes your AWS S3 cost, usage, and utilization metrics for the past 30 days. Rightsizing produces bucket-level insights and optimization recommendations. Spend is determined by GB Months.

Customize the dashboard

You can set the following options to customize your dashboard.

Select Account

By default, the dashboard shows recommendations for all accounts. To view recommendations for a particular account, select the account name from the Account dropdown.

Specify Timeline

You can choose to review spend across the last 10 days or the last 30 days. By default, the Timeline option is set to 10 days . For most users, 10 days is the recommended time period because it captures the most recent performance trends and is more predictive of future resource use.

Apply Filters

You can add filters to include or exclude data based on one or more conditions.

Add a filter

To add a filter:

1. Select Add Filter from the toolbar.
2. In the filter overlay choose a Dimension.
3. Select an Operator to provide a logical condition.
4. Choose a value to refine your filter.
5. Select Add Filter to apply the new filter to the page.

Apply filters with links

You can also add filters by selecting the blue hyperlinked values in the main table. The filter rule is automatically applied to the Filters field. You can select only one value or parameter from each column at a time.

Remove a filter

To remove a filter:

1. Select the filter icon .
2. Select X next to the filter that you want to remove.

Key Performance Indicators

You can view the following Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on your Rightsizing dashboard:

• Total Spend: Shows the total current allocated spend.
• Estimated Rightsizing Savings: Shows the estimated total potential savings achievable for all Rightsize recommendations.
• Estimated Optimized Spend : Shows the estimated total spend after recommendations are applied.

Rightsizing recommendations table

The dashboard contains a rightsizing recommendations table, which provides an overview of your S3 resources. The table includes the following columns:

• Bucket Name: The S3 bucket name.
• Account Name: The AWS account name.
• Size: The size of all objects within the bucket.
• Objects: The number objects within the bucket.
• Requests: The number of requests (read, write, list) done via the console or API.
• Cost: The cost incurred for the past 30-days for the objects within the bucket.
• Current: The derived storage class for the bucket. When 100% of all objects are in the same storage class, that storage class will be displayed. If a bucket consists of objects within multiple storage classes, then MIXED will be displayed. Clicking the details will display the relative distribution across these classes.
• New: The recommended optimal storage class for all objects within the bucket.
• Action : Recommendation for the resource. The recommendation can be one of the following

Cost Savings : The estimated 10- or 30-day cost savings amount.

Export recommendations to an Excel file

To export the recommendations to an excel file, select Export . Note that the excel file will include several additional columns, such as region, operating system, unit price, and others.

Recommendation details

To view the recommendation details for a particular resource, select View Details from the More Options (3 dots) menu.

The following figure shows a sample recommendation details panel.

The S3 details panel shows the following information:

Recommendations

Shows one or more recommendations, ranked by cost savings and risk (0-5).

• Savings: Estimated savings percent for the 10- or 30-day period.
• Cost Savings: Estimated savings amount.
• Storage Class: Recommended storage class.
• Action: Recommended action.
• Risk: On a scale of 0-5, the number of storage class transitions from frequent to infrequent access.

Charts

• Storage Size (Bytes): Displays the storage size amount by storage class. The possible values include the following:
  • Standard
  • Intelligent FA (Intelligent Tiering - Frequent Access)
  • Intelligent IA (Intelligent Tiering = Infrequent Access)
  • Infrequent Access
  • One Zone
  • Glacier
  • Deep Archive
  • Reduced Redundancy
• Requests (Read/Write/Count): Displays read and write requests performed against the bucket. This chart provides valuable insights into the usage category of the bucket such as mostly reads, balanced read-writes, or write oriented.
• Number of Objects (Count): The graph shows the number of objects in the bucket over the time period.
• Data Transferred (Bytes): Amount of egress to the internet (or data transferred across regions).
• Data Transitions (Bytes): Amount of data transitioned across storage classes (excludes Standard).
• Early Deletion (Bytes): Amount of storage incurring an early deletion fee.

Taking action on recommendations

Storage classes

To transition the storage class of objects in bulk, you have two options:

• Object Life Cycle Management

  You can enable a life cycle management rule at the bucket level to transition all contained objects to the recommended storage class based on the object creation date.

  For more information about object life cycle management, refer to https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/object-lifecycle-mgmt.html .

• S3 Batch Operations

  If you prefer a programmatic route, you can leverage S3 Batch Operations to change the storage class of all or selected objects within one or more buckets.

  For more information about batch operations, refer to https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-s3-batch-operations/ .

Intelligent Tiering

Intelligent Tiering is a hybrid storage class service that monitors each object’s access patterns and attributes. Based on this data, the service will automatically transition objects between the Standard and Infrequent Access storage class for a per-object monitoring fee in addition to the storage class-specific rates.

Bucket level rightsizing helps you to identify which buckets will benefit from this service. Although most objects are created in the Standard class initially, as your S3 buckets become optimized over time, additional incremental optimization recommendations such as Infrequent Access or even Glacier may be recommended.

For more information, refer to https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/ .