Enabling Cost Controls in AWS Control Tower

So what are some of the ways that we’re enabling cost control with our AWS Control Tower and landing zone deployments? 

It’s absolutely important to build a cost control mechanism into your landing zone. We use services like AWS config to set your benchmark of what your infrastructure environment should look like. And you can use AWS config to auto-remediate and remove services that shouldn’t be there. You can use other things like “tags” to designate resources that you deployed that need to remain. This is really helpful in lower tier environments like Development or Sandbox, where you have people constantly spinning up services and tearing down resources. More often than not, they’re going to forget to tear something down and that can lead to unexpected costs.

The classic example is setting your Amazon EC2 instances to shutdown every night. At Caylent, we’re big on experimentation. If a customer comes to us and they want to pilot a new service, it’s easy for us to spin up a dev environment and deploy a service – Amazon SageMaker is a good example – and we can run a bunch of training models and oftentimes we get so enthusiastic about this, we need to remember to tear down these services once we’re done using them and something like AWS Config lets us do this. 

And so that automated cost control mechanism is already in place so that we were not racking up all these unexpected charges over time. So we take services internally and we experiment and we build things on our own AWS infrastructure, we roll our own cost controls around that, and we provide those cost controls to our customers as well.

We also work with our customers and we take their input and find out where they want to go with their AWS environment, and oftentimes we’ll use that input to iterate on our offerings. For example, our AWS Control Tower Catalyst offering is a perfect example. 

We were talking about cost control mechanisms. Now we’re working to build that into our AWS Control Tower Catalyst. That comes as a direct feedback from a customer need. 

At Caylent, we are so confident in our ability to deliver AWS Control Towers for customers that we offer a fixed fee control tower at $22,000. We know that we can set up an AWS Control Tower implementation for a customer including the landing zone, all the customizations, workshops for training, especially for customers that have not used AWS before. We can really help them learn all the features, all the services involved, and roll it out for them in a very quick, efficient & impactful way.