Optimization is a very important aspect of operating in the cloud, and this is a continuous process of improvement. In this section, you will learn about the various optimization areas. There are chapters dedicated to each optimization consideration in this book. The following are the major optimization areas:

• Cost: Optimize the cost efficiency of an application or a group of applications, while considering fluctuating resource needs. You will learn more about architecture cost
  considerations in Chapter 11, Cost Considerations.

• Security: Continuously review and improve security policies and processes for the organization to protect data and assets in the AWS cloud. You will learn more about architecture security considerations in Chapter 8, Security Considerations.
• Reliability: Optimize applications for reliability to achieve high availability and defined downtime thresholds for applications, which will aid in recovering from failures, handling increased demand, and mitigating disruptions over time. You will learn more about architecture reliability consideration in Chapter 9, Architectural Reliability Considerations.
• Operational excellence: Optimize operational efficiency and the ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to improve supporting processes and procedures continually. You will learn more about architecture operational considerations in Chapter 10, Operational Excellence Considerations.
• Performance: Optimize for performance to ensure that a system is architected to deliver efficient performance for a set of resources, such as instances, storage, databases, and space/time. You will learn more about architecture performance considerations in Chapter 7, Performance Considerations.

To optimize costs, you need to understand what is currently being deployed in your cloud environment and the price of each of those resources. By using detailed billing reports and enabling billing alerts, you can proactively monitor your costs in the cloud.

Remember that, in the public cloud, you pay for what you use. Therefore, you might be able to reduce costs by turning off instances when they are not needed. By automating your instance deployment, you can also tear down and build up the instance entirely as required.

As you offload more, you need to maintain, scale, and pay for less infrastructure. Another way to optimize costs is by designing your architecture for elasticity. Make sure you right-size your resources, use auto-scaling, and adjust your utilization based on price and need. For example, it might be more cost-efficient for an application to use more small instances than fewer large instances.

Several application architectural modifications can help you improve the performance of your application. One way to improve the performance of your web servers is to offload your web page through caching. You can write an application that lets you cache images, JavaScript, or even full pages to provide a better experience to your users.

You can design n-tier and service-oriented architectures to scale each layer and module independently, which will help optimize performance. You will learn more about this architecture pattern in Chapter 6, Solution Architecture Design Patterns.