How AWS Can Assist in Managing Demand and Supply Cost Effectively
Cost optimisation, the fifth and final pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, contains guidelines that allow you to deliver your products at the lowest price point. By working in the cloud, you can lower your costs and increase your productivity.
The cloud also allows you to pay only for what you need, when you need it, giving you the flexibility to pair down or amp up. To ensure that your workload is balanced, follow these best practices.
Analyse the Workload Demands
First, you need to know what your current workload demands are. Do a complete analysis of your workload. Use current and past data, and look at your customer logs to see how customers usually interact with your workload.
Be sure to include a full cycle’s worth of data. If you have a busy season and a slow season, you’ll need to change your supply accordingly.
AWS suggests that you use the actual demand in requests per second, when the rate of demand changes, and the rate of change of the demand as your metrics.
You should also forecast outside influences by meeting with team members in marketing, sales or business development. They can tell you about upcoming events that might increase or lower demands.
Manage Demand with a Buffer or Throttle
If there are sudden jumps in demand, a buffer or a throttle can help to smooth them out, enabling your workload to function normally. If a client retries, you’ll want to use a throttle. Buffering allows you to store the request and process it later.
Ensure that you always process your buffered requests within the expected time scale. You can use Amazon Simple Queue Service to implement buffering and Amazon API Gateway for throttling.
Dynamically Supply Resources
You can supply resources using either a time-scale or an auto-scale. For some businesses, a combination of both approaches works best.
Use time-based scheduling when you have a steady, even demand. If you know that the demand will rise or fall on a specific date, you can schedule your supply to increase at that time.
Auto-scaling scheduling works better with more unpredictable levels of demands. You can configure your systems to automatically detect a change in demand and increase or decrease supply.
Use AWS Auto-Scaling to configure both types of scheduling.
Work with an AWS Partner
If you aren’t confident about your workload analysis or simply want to confirm that you are operating within the guidelines of the Well-Architected Framework, consult with an AWS Partner like WOLK to learn more and highlight areas of non-compliance.