About Stalwart Learning:

 

Stalwart Learning is a premier corporate Online/VILT, Classroom, Blended Learning, E-Learning and Cloud Labs provider, where we partner with our clients to upskill & transform their employees at various levels – right from new hires to top management.

Since our client’s requirements are dynamic, we constantly monitor market trends, industry best practices and proactively keep ourselves updated with the latest and relevant learning solutions.

Our instructors and consultants include, subject matter experts, speakers who have worked with reputed organizations at senior positions with vast hands-on experience.

Our learning solutions include in the areas of Digital, Automation, Data Science, Cloud, IoT, Security, Agile, Soft Skills, Automobile, BFSI, Insurance, Telecom, etc

 

The Challenge:

 

Stalwart Learning is an Online/VILT, Classroom, Blended Learning, E-Learning and Cloud Labs provider, so it is basic need to have proper management of services that are used during the learning process as it may incur huge costs. Also, there was a need for a billing & security monitoring system. So as AWS is currently a platform, they work on various services that are available to meet the requirement as discussed below.

 

Resolution:

 

Stalwart learning has decided to choose the following listed number of services to meet the requirements. In this they had taken help form various Monitoring services, security management services. Alarm system for billing usage & cost explorer.

Listed below are a few of the services taken into consideration. The support offered by AWS is admirable. The quick resolution helps to reach commitment easily and business grows.

AWS provides documents to help maintain the security at best level. And also, the shared responsibility model explains every concern.

The architectural flow of the service is as follows not limited to cost optimization but also security in cloud as mentioned in the shared responsibility model.

 

 

User management on AWS Architecture Diagram:

 

 

This architecture gives the brief idea about the implementation of user management & best security practices on AWS.

AWS Trusted Advisor: Reduce costs, improve performance, improve security.

AWS Trusted Advisor is an online tool that provides you real time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices. Trusted Advisor checks help optimize your AWS infrastructure, improve security and performance, reduce your overall costs, and monitor service limits. Whether establishing new workflows, developing applications, or as part of ongoing improvement, take advantage of the recommendations provided by Trusted Advisor on a regular basis to help keep your solutions provisioned optimally.

 

AWS Identity and Access Management

 

When you first create an AWS account, you begin with a single sign-in identity that has complete access to all AWS services and resources in the account. This identity is called the AWS account root user and is accessed by signing in with the email address and password that you used to create the account. We strongly recommend that you do not use the root user for your everyday tasks, even the administrative ones. Instead, adhere to the best practice of using the root user only to create your first IAM user. Then securely lock away the root user credentials and use them to perform only a few account and service management tasks.

Amazon CloudWatch: Observability of your AWS resources and applications on AWS and on-premises

 

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health. CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, providing you with a unified view of AWS resources, applications, and services that run on AWS and on-premises servers. You can use CloudWatch to detect anomalous behavior in your environments, set alarms, visualize logs and metrics side by side, take automated actions, troubleshoot issues, and discover insights to keep your applications running smoothly.

 

AWS Cost Explorer has an easy-to-use interface that lets you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time.

 

Get started quickly by creating custom reports that analyze cost and usage data. Analyze your data at a high level (for example, total costs and usage across all accounts) or dive deeper into your cost and usage data to identify trends, pinpoint cost drivers, and detect anomalies.

 

Also, guidance on how to optimize the cost following guide is helpful.

 

Control your AWS costs:

 

In this guide you will learn how to control your costs while exploring AWS service offerings using AWS Budgets to set up a cost budget to monitor any costs associated with your usage.

 

Short Description

The AWS makes certain amounts and types of resources for new AWS accounts available free of charge for certain limits. Any amounts and types of resources that aren’t covered are charged at standard rates.

 

To avoid unnecessary charges:

• Understand what services and resources are being used & how the pricing works for the same.
• To know more about the pricing details of AWS offered services & resources visit AWS Pricing.
• Monitor usage with AWS Budgets.
• Monitor costs in the Billing and Cost Management console.
• Be sure that your planned configuration falls under the Budget you are willing to pay.
• You can also take help of Aws Cost explorer  & AWS CloudWatch Alarms.
• Clean up test resources when you’re done using them.

 

Resolution

Understand what services and resources are covered: Make sure you have complete information about the service costs.

Use AWS Budgets to monitor your usage:

opt in to the AWS Budgets Alert This alert notifies you when your usage will lead to charges.

Monitor your bill:

Always monitor your usage in AWS Cost explorer & Billing Dashboard.

Plan your configuration before testing:

Use the AWS Pricing Calculator to see whether your planned resource configuration is entirely covered under the Budget or not.

Clean up test resources:

To terminate your test resources after testing, see How do I terminate all my resources before closing my AWS account?

 

Also set up the Billing alarm if needed e.g.

To enable the monitoring of estimated charges (Root Access)

1. Open the Billing and Cost Management console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/.
2. In the navigation pane, choose Billing Preferences.
3. Choose Receive Billing Alerts.
4. Choose Save preferences.

 

 

For more details : https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/monitor_estimated_charges_with_cloudwatch.html

 

Reference:

Six Ways to Reduce Your AWS Bill : https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/startups/six-ways-to-reduce-your-aws-bill/

How do you pay for AWS?  https://aws.amazon.com/pricing/

Billing Alarm : https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/monitor_estimated_charges_with_cloudwatch.html