Hey everyone! I'm handling DevOps for our company, and we've been using AWS Lightsail for most of our projects. It's been great for simplicity and cost savings, but as our number of projects and servers keeps increasing, management is becoming a challenge. We're using Docker Swarm to deploy our applications, hosting dev, test, and production environments on the same servers. I'm planning a gradual migration to EC2 because I want to adopt Terraform for managing our infrastructure, plus I want to learn it personally. However, I'm concerned about the higher costs associated with EC2, especially since we're a startup. I'm looking for ways to justify this cost difference to management. Is there a way to transition without increasing our expenses or even save more? Has anyone here gone through a similar migration? I'd love to hear your experiences and advice. Thanks!
3 Answers
EC2 might actually be one of the cheaper options if you're managing everything yourself. You can look into savings plans to commit to usage for up to 60% off. It’s all about how you implement it to speed up development and provide more stability, but you need to present that value to your team. Honestly, there's barely a difference between EC2 and Lightsail. ECS and maybe using ALB might be better options, but they come at a higher cost. It's a trade-off for sure!
At your budget level, there's really not much you can do to lower costs unless you're spending over $10k a month. For bigger setups, reserved instances or savings plans could help. By the way, why not consider Terraform? CloudFormation is already native to AWS, and unless you need complex state management, CFM can meet all your needs, including a user-friendly interface.
I'm hoping to learn Terraform and keep up with the latest technology trends.
If you're working with containers, you might want to consider using EKS. It allows you to run worker nodes on spot instances which can reduce compute costs by over 60% if your app can handle failovers gracefully.
I haven't really thought about EKS. It seems like it could complicate things for setting up our infrastructure, but I’ll definitely check it out. Thanks!
Yeah, Terraform with AWS and EKS is a great combo. To save on costs, if you can predict your workload, go for EC2 reserved instances. You can get about 70% off with a 3-year commitment. Another option is to look into Terraform with AWS and ECS, which could be less complex than Kubernetes.
I’m planning to run EC2 servers just when needed for testing/dev, maybe with some scheduled shutdowns to save costs. That way I can use Terraform which should simplify management. Appreciate the input!