Eight tips to roll a service or app into an AWS deployment

It's important for admins to continually track cloud resource usage and costs -- especially when they fold a new service or workload into an AWS deployment.

IT professionals often consume cloud resources in an a-la-carte fashion, and AWS is all too happy to meter and bill those services accordingly. When you automatically provision capacity, it's easy to lose track of application resources -- and what those resources cost each month.

AWS tagging can help clear up some confusion. AWS tags enable admins to add metadata that helps categorize AWS resources. For example, they can identify a resource's owner, department or intended usage. AWS tagging makes it easier to search, filter and summarize resources for specific workloads or business entities. It also helps admins organize and compare costs attributable to those workloads, users and departments.

Remember that each AWS account carries certain resource limits. For example, developers can launch a finite number of EC2 instances in a given AWS region. When a business runs numerous workloads in the same AWS region, it can encounter service limitations that prevent workloads from running or scaling as needed.

Admins should regularly review EC2 and other resource limitations in the AWS Management Console. They should compare summaries of resource usage to identify resources in danger of exceeding limits. Admins can ask AWS for an increase to many limits, but it's important to submit those requests well in advance.