GAMECOST01-BP02 Discover opportunities for optimization

Game developers and publishers can use AWS FinOps practices to help optimize their cloud costs and gain better visibility into their cloud spending. By doing so, game producers can align the average cost required to maintain infrastructure for the players with the financial results delivered by the game.

Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: Low

Implementation guidance

AWS offers a ready to use solution guidance for Cloud Financial Management to manage and optimize your expenses for cloud services. This capability includes granular visibility and cost and usage analysis to support decision-making for topics such as spend dashboards, optimization, spend limits, charge back, and anomaly detection and response. The solution guidance for Cloud Financial Management includes budget and forecasting features, giving you a defined, cost-optimized architecture for your workloads so you can select the right pricing model and attribute resource costs relevant to your teams. This activates tracking, notification, and cost optimization techniques across your environment and resources. You can centrally manage expense information and give critical stakeholders access as needed for targeted visibility and to support decision-making.

Another key FinOps tool is the Cost Optimization Hub, which provides a centralized view of cost optimization recommendations and opportunities across your AWS accounts and AWS Regions, so that you can get the most out of your AWS spend. You can use Cost Optimization Hub to identify, filter, and aggregate AWS cost optimization recommendations across your AWS accounts and AWS Regions. It makes recommendations on resource rightsizing, idle resource deletion, Savings Plans, and Reserved Instances. With a single dashboard, you avoid having to go to multiple AWS products to identify cost optimization opportunities.

If your games teams are using shared AWS accounts the myApplications in AWS Management Console Home, can be used to view application resource costs for individual workloads. This granular view allows you to identify the specific cost trends within your game infrastructure, enabling you to make informed decisions about resource allocation and optimization.

Additionally, regularly reviewing your billing and cost management data with AWS Data Exports uncovers hidden cost savings opportunities. This detailed report provides a comprehensive breakdown of your cloud spending, allowing you to identify areas of overspending, unutilized resources, and opportunities to take advantage of more cost-effective services or pricing models.

By embracing FinOps principles and leveraging the tools provided by AWS, game developers and publishers can make the most efficient use of their cloud resources, ultimately enhancing their bottom line and freeing up funds for further game development and innovation.

Implementation steps