# Best Practice 20.5 – Review usage for opportunities to optimize Review your SAP workload periodically to identify opportunities to optimize cost. Regular reviews should focus on: minimizing the differences and anomalies found between your AWS bill and your SAP workload budget, checking that all your SAP cloud resources are appropriately sized and not over-provisioned, and understanding any new AWS service releases or cost reductions that could improve the cost effectiveness of your SAP workload. **Suggestion 20.5.1 – Minimize additional cost where your usage has been higher than initially planned** Your cloud usage might have grown outside of your estimated cost model due to unplanned business events or additional performance required. Analyze these changes with a view to optimizing the new cost. Consider additional Savings Plan commitments or Reserved Instances if this is a sustained change. Where additional capacity is required for only short periods, consider horizontal scaling mechanisms (for example, additional SAP application servers) using automatic scaling or scheduled On-Demand Instance capacity to minimize cost further. **Suggestion 20.5.2 – Review SAP workload usage metrics and further right-size where possible** Regularly review the components supporting your SAP system to ensure they are right-sized. Use CloudWatch metrics to consider: + Is the SAP EC2 compute the right size? Is CPU or memory utilization low? Could you move to a smaller EC2 instance size? + Is SAP storage the right size? Is there excess space provisioned but unused? Could you reduce volume sizes? + Is SAP storage appropriately performant? Is there excess IOPS or MBPS provisioned which could be reduced? + Are backup and snapshots being managed appropriately? Do you have too many backup copies on S3 Standard which could be archived to Amazon S3 Infrequently Accessed or Amazon Glacier? + Use tools such as [AWS Compute Optimizer](https://aws.amazon.com/compute-optimizer/) and [AWS Trusted Advisor](https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/technology/trusted-advisor/) to identify additional areas for optimization. Be aware of SAP specific compute and storage restrictions as per SAP note: [1656099 - SAP Applications on AWS: Supported DB/OS and Amazon EC2 products](https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/1656099) [Requires SAP Portal Access]. Use your findings to continually right-size your SAP workload components on a regular basis and maximize your use of Savings Plans and Reserved Instances. **Suggestion 20.5.3 – Understand new AWS services and plan to implement where further cost optimization can be achieved** AWS regularly releases new services and periodically reduces prices. Review new SAP on AWS service announcements and plan to take advantage of these in your architecture at a minimum every 12 months. If you have a technical account manager (TAM) as part of an Enterprise Support agreement with AWS, they can assist you in a regular new service briefing and optimization discussion. Subscribe to the [SAP on AWS blog](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/awsforsap/) and the [What’s New](https://aws.amazon.com/new/) feed for the latest announcements and news. See [Operational Excellence]: [Best Practice 4.4 - Perform regular workload reviews to optimize for resiliency, performance, agility, and cost](best-practice-4-4.md) for further information on continued optimization of your SAP workload.