Cost Saving options for Workspaces with low usage

Question

A customer is interested in cost saving options for workspaces. They use Workspaces Cost Optimizer to swap between hourly and monthly + they have auto-stop set to 2 hours. However, they noticed that if a workspace is provisioned as hourly on Jan 1 and used only once for an hour, it is charged a monthly fee until it is terminated.

The cost optimization options I researched included implementing custom code (lambda) to view workspace metrics in CloudWatch then trigger a shutdown based on indicators. Please advise if this is the best options to improve cost.

Accepted Answer

A WorkSpace instance is a long lived persistent desktop, meaning we keep the storage for the users WorkSpace (EBS Volumes) WorkSpace 'hot' so that when they log back in all we need to do is to start the underlying instance from Hibernation.

For AutoStop instances, even if the user never logs into the WorkSpace in a given month and even if the WorkSpace instance is never started, there is a monthly flag-fall cost to keep the EBS Storage.

The price of this varies on the Bundle Type, details here:

https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/pricing/

Also quickly worth noting that the customer pays for the Compute cost of the WorkSpace instance Running, and not the time that the user is actually active in the WorkSpace. For AutoStop instances, we (AWS) will start each AutoStop WorkSpace once per month to allow that instance to be patched and updated. Customers can disable this functionality if they wish:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/workspaces/latest/adminguide/workspace-maintenance.html

I hope this helps you here!

Cost Saving options for Workspaces with low usage

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