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

In step 3, select “Compute Savings Plan”
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 hourly commitment of $3/hour, we recommend you to go with $2.1/hour (0.7 * $3/hour).
3. 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

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 set by Glean; this is set by the customer.

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"
            }
        }
    ]
}