AWS Reserved Instances Archives

Not Only EC2, 6 More AWS Services That Can be Reserved

Posted on August 5, 2017 by Rajeev Kumar

Cloud Cost Management through Reserved Instance option

AWS, the pioneer of Cloud Platforms, has created three different pricing models which can suit an organization based on the life cycle stage they are in regard to Cloud usage. The first and most well-known model is the on-demand model under which resources are priced based on actual usage like hourly compute or storage, I/O capacity consumption etc. This pricing model is best suited when a company is not exactly sure of its usage pattern and is getting started on the Cloud Platform. Once the company is accustomed to the Cloud Platform and its benefits, it can upgrade to the next model -“Reserved instance”, to get 30-50% price reduction by committing the resource consumption for a one or three years’ time. The third model, “Spot Instances” is for buying resources to use only in periodic surges in resource demand.

While Reserved Instance Model for AWS EC2 is quite well known, AWS also provides the same pricing model for many other services as well. Let us look in-depth into 6 More AWS Services which can be consumed under Reserved Instance price model.

AWS RDS

After Computing Power, the most used resource is database. Databases are a very significant portion of an enterprise’s resource capacity and as it is often run 24/7. Hence adopting the Reserved Instance pricing model for RDS is a worthwhile investment. Amazon RDS Reserved Instances give you the option to reserve a DB instance for one or three year term and in turn receive a significant discount compared to the On-Demand Instance pricing for the DB instance.

It is important to note that RDS will be charged for every hour during the entire reservation term one selects, regardless of whether the database instance is running or not. There are two different factors that have to be considered while planning out Reserved Instances for RDS.

Commitment Term: AWS provides two types of commitment terms durations.

1-year term which is useful for production databases with predictable workloads

3-year term which is useful for stable production databases for long running applications

Payment Options: Once the commitment term is decided, there are 3 payment options to choose from, based on the percentage of upfront payment one is willing to pay.

No Upfront: In this model, no upfront payment is required at purchase. The discount is however lower when compared to other payment options. This is not applicable if the commitment term is 3 years.

Partial Upfront: In this model, a portion of the cost is paid upfront and the remaining hours in the term are billed at the established discounted hourly rate. This model strikes a right balance between upfront and hourly.

Full Upfront: In this model, the cost of the entire term is paid to get the best effective hourly price

AWS DynamoDB

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. When using DynamoDB, the pricing is a flat, hourly rate service based on how much capacity is provisioned. Like other services, DynamoDB Reserved Capacity also offers significant savings over the on-demand price of DynamoDB if the capacity is paid for in advance. One has to choose to commit a capacity model comprising of a fixed amount of Write Capacity and Read Capacity units. However, the cost is incurred even if the resource is not utilized.

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is the content delivery web service that helps businesses to distribute content to end users with low latency and high data transfer speeds. AWS CloudFront Reserved Capacity gives you the option to commit to a minimum monthly usage level for a year or longer to receive a significant discount. AWS CloudFront Reserved Capacity pricing metric is based on volume of data transfer. The pricing begins at a minimum of 10 TB of data transfer per month from a single region. If the users commit to higher volume usage, they are eligible for receiving additional discounts.

AWS ElastiCache

ElastiCache helps developers to set up, manage, and scale a distributed in-memory cache environment in the cloud. Developers can choose their cache engine to be either Memcached or Redis protocol-compliant. The key benefit of using AWS ElastiCache is that provides a high-performance, scalable and cost-effective caching solution, without the usual complexity of managing a distributed cache environment manually.

The reserved instance price model is almost same as that of AWS DynamoDB where Reserved nodes are charged an upfront fee that depends upon the node type and the reservation term years. In addition to the upfront charge there is an hourly usage charge

Elastic MapReduce

Amazon Elastic MapReduce is BigData Platform as a Service for large volume data analysis. AWS Elastic MapReduce is based on Apache Hadoop which distributes work across different virtual servers which are in clusters in AWS Cloud.

The Unique Reserved Instance Pricing Policy of AWS Elastic MapReduce are as follows:

An On-Demand Instance should be specified in the cluster configuration that matches the Reserved Instance specification. The cluster should be launched within the same Availability Zone of the instance reservation

Amazon RedShift

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. Amazon Redshift On-Demand pricing has no upfront costs and has an on-demand pricing scheme where users pay an hourly rate based on the type and number of nodes in the cluster. Users can save up to 75% over On-Demand rates by committing to a Reserved Instance for a fixed term ranging from 1 year to 3 years.

Your Cloud Strategy is optimal only when Reserved Instances are leveraged well and wherever applicable. Botmetric can help you manage your Cloud from Cloud Perspective through proactive advices based on Best Practices. Take a Complete demo of Botmetric to benefit from its capabilities.

AWS EC2 Reserved Instances — Choosing the Right One that Fits You

Posted on June 8, 2017 by Rajeev Kumar

AWS EC2 Reserved Instances (RIs), which provide significant discount compared to on-demand pricing, have been extensively used by enterprises and businesses of all sizes across the globe.

In this post, I am going to discuss the types of use cases where AWS EC2 Reserved Instances will fit in for optimal discount, the complete flow of reserving the RIs, preferences behind reserving RIs ( to choose capacity first or discounts first), and much more. Just so that you can choose the right RI that fits your needs.

The Backdrop

Currently, AWS offers its users to buy compute instances in 3 modes: on-demand, reserved instances, and spot instances. Let’s dive into the details of these three instances.

On-demand Instances: With on-demand instances, you pay for compute capacity by the hour with no long-term commitments or upfront payments. You can increase or decrease your compute capacity depending on the demands of your application and only pay the specified hourly rate for the instances you use.
- Pay-as-you-go, no commitment, pay hourly rate.
- Suitable for unpredictable workloads, or developed or testing in EC2 newly.
Reserved Instances: RIs provide you with a significant discount (up to 75%) compared to on-demand instance pricing. In addition, when reserved instances are assigned to a specific Availability Zone, they provide a capacity reservation thereby giving you additional confidence while launching instances when you need them.
- Significant discount, 1 year or 3 year commitment.
- Ideal for predictable and steady usage.
Spot Instances: AWS allows you to bid on spare Amazon EC2 computing capacity. These instances are known as spot instances. Spot instances are often available at a higher discounted rate compared to on-demand pricing. So you can significantly reduce the cost of running your applications, grow your application’s compute capacity and throughput for the same budget. You can bid for Spot instances using AWS API’s, AWS CLI and Web Console. Your Spot instance runs whenever your bid exceeds the current market price.
- Provide up to 90 % discount.
- Useful for steady and flexible workloads such as batch processing.

Now, let’s discuss about how to make the most of RIs by understanding the attributes that define RI, offering class, plans of RI, and the factors that affect your savings.

Of all the AWS instances, RIs are the ones which give you massive discounts. The discounts provided will vary from 45%-75% depending on the plan and scope that you choose.
RIs affinity will decide on which account the RI is actually applied.
RI can provide optional capacity reservation.
1. Reservation will be applied only in the account that purchased the RI.
2. If you are planning to purchase capacity reservation, ensure you purchase it in the account where you are going to use it. Because while applying the RI discounts, owner account is always given the priority.
AWS assigns reserved instance hours to linked accounts. It always starts first with the linked account that purchased the reservation, which is sometimes called Reserved Instance affinity. If there are hours from the capacity reservation left over, they are applied to other accounts operating identical usage types in the same Availability Zone. Again, this allocation always occurs using unblended rates.

Payment Options for AWS RI

To purchase RIs, AWS offers three payment options, namely All Upfront, Partial Upfront, No Upfront.

All Upfront: Pay full amount for the reservation term in one single payment. This one gives the highest savings.
Partial Upfront: Pay portion of amount for part of the reservation term in an upfront payment and pay the remaining in installments every month for the duration of the term. This option costs more than All Upfront, but less than No Upfront.
No Upfront: Pay for the reservation in installments throughout the term’s duration every month. This payment offers the lowest savings rate.

Apart from the discount you get individually from the above plans, if you have total active RI list value above $5,000,000 per region, you get more discount, from 5% to 10%. This discount is known as RI Volume Discount.

Note: It is highly recommended to purchase the RIs in bulk together in a single transaction. The reasons being: you can merge the RIs if reservation going to be unused due to the changing requirements over the time.

AWS RI Offering Classes

AWS offers the RIs in three modes, i.e Standard, Convertible, and Scheduled, where each have advantages and disadvantages of their own.

Standard RIs: These provide the most significant discount (up to 75% off on-demand) and are best suited for steady-state usage as shown in the below pic. If the load and infra per instance is properly estimated by load testing, and is not going to change frequently for at least an year, these RIs are recommended.

Image source: Botmeric, AWS EC2 Consistent Usage Graph

This mode of RI will give maximum discount over other modes.

Convertible RIs: These provide a discount of up to 45% over on-demand instances, and the capability to change the attributes of the RIs as long as the exchange results in the creation of Reserved Instances are of equal or greater value.

Like Standard RIs, Convertible RIs are also best suited for steady-state usage. These provide good discount but less than the standard RIs, average of 45% discount. With this offering class, you can change every attribute of RI. No limits to exchange size. You can purchase the convertible RIs only with 3 year term plan. You can check if RI is convertible or not by verifying the “Offering Class” in the AWS console.

Plus, with convertible RIs, you can exchange the RIs across the family. For example: from t2 to m4, with different OS, Windows to Linux, to new instance size. medium to large, and more.

P.S: While exchanging the convertible RIs, you may need to either exchange it with instance type/size smaller than the current one, or vice versa.

Refer the below two use cases:

Exchanging the instance with lower cost: In this scenario, you will get additional instances, which are either unused or applied to other instance types. For example, say that you are running m4.4xlarge instance in us-east-1a, as per your new requirement, if you are exchanging it with t2.large instance in us-east-1a (as t2 family instances are cheaper than m4), you will get 5 t2.large instances for exchanging 1 m4.4xlarge instance.

Exchanging instance with higher cost: While exchanging the instance with higher cost than the current one, you may need to pay true up charge, which will be reflected in your current month bill.Below is the formula used for calculating the true up charge of an RI.

True up charge = new convertible RI you receive by exchange — prorated upfront charges of current instance.

For example: say that you have an t2.micro instance in 3 year term plan partial upfront with 32 months remaining. Now, if you go for exchanging that instance with t2.small instance, then

The total upfront price of your new reservation t2.small is : $133.792,

Remaining upfront value of your exchanged reservations : $109.25,

True Upcharge = 133.792–109.25 = 24.54 with hourly rate of $0.006.

You can exchange with convertible RI only if the following conditions are met.

Active
Not pending another exchange request
Terminating in the same hour (but not minutes or seconds)

Limitations of Convertible RIs

There are few limitations to take into account while dealing with Convertible RIs:

Convertible RIs can only be exchanged for other Convertible Reserved Instances currently offered by AWS.
Convertible RIs cannot be modified. You can only exchange it with other configuration.
Convertible RIs can only be exchanged with the same or higher payment option. For example Partial Upfront Convertible Reserved Instances can be exchanged for All Upfront Convertible Reserved Instances but they cannot be exchanged for No Upfront Convertible Reserved Instances.

Scheduled RIs: These are available for discounts within the time windows you reserve. This option allows you to match your reservation to a predictable recurring schedule that only requires a fraction of a day, a week, or a month. These are recommended heavily when you have predictable spike for a duration or for running the batch jobs. For example, this reservation is recommended when your system generates reports at 2:00PM every day and emails to all your product users.

Note: You can purchase the RIs in this mode using AWS CLI, API’s, AWS management console.

Scope of RIs — Zonal RI & Regional RI

Zonal RIs: Any RI purchased for specific availability zone is called as zonal RI. In this scope of RI, instance capacity reserved for your use in that AZ gives better confidence while launching instances. If you want to run an instance in AZ and if AWS has reached the capacity of instance type you need, then you will not be able to launch the instance due to hardware limitation in that AZ.

With Zonal RIs, irrespective of instance being used or not, the instance capacity is assigned to you. Capacity reservation are available within that account. The attributes that decide the RIs discount are Instance Type, Tenancy (Shared/Dedicated), Availability Zone, Operating System. These RIs will be applied to the instances running with same instance type and OS in the AZ RI purchased. This is highly recommended when you are reserving the higher instances types on AWS, as they are limited.

Regional RIs: This scope is recommended if you prefer the discount over the capacity since region scope does not offer capacity reservation. But regional RIs give flexibility over managing the RIs as if it has broader applicability and flexibility. These RIs are recommended for maximum discounts. Note that based on your requirement, you can always modify the scope of RIs with no extra cost.

Instance Size Flexibility

All regional Linux/UNIX RIs with shared tenancy apply to all sizes of instances within an instance family and AWS region (even if you are using them across multiple linked accounts). This will help further in reducing the AWS costs. In this RIs are applied based on scale known as normalization factor within a particular instance family. Below is the normalization factor table for instance sizes.

Let’s say you already own an RI for a m4.16x large. This RI now applies to any usage of a Linux/UNIX C4 instance with shared tenancy in the region.

This could be applied on either:

Four m4.4xlarge instance
Eight m4.2xlarge instances
Sixteen m4.xlarge instances
Thirty two m4.large instances.

Or any combination of above instances for above family that matches to the total normalization factor.

Limitations of instance size flexibility:

This is not applied on Zonal RIs.
This is not applied on Windows, RHEL.

Rate will be applied completely if proper match is found, else it will be partially applied for the units.

How RIs are Applied?

Zonal RIs are always applied first.
Regional RIs are applied next.
The instance size flexibility. Applied by the first qualified instance based on the instance.

Understanding the Application of Reserved Instances

The following scenarios cover the ways in which Reserved Instances are applied.

Scenario One

A customer is running the following On-Demand Instances in account A:

4 x m3.large Linux, default tenancy instances in Availability Zone us-east-1a

2 x m4.xlarge Amazon Linux, default tenancy instances in Availability Zone us-east-1b

1 x c4.xlarge Amazon Linux, default tenancy instances in Availability Zone us-east-1c

The customer then purchases the following Reserved Instances in account A:

4 x m3.large Linux, default tenancy Reserved Instances in Availability Zone us-east-1a (capacity is reserved)

4 x m4.large Amazon Linux, default tenancy Reserved Instances in us-east-1

1 x c4.large Amazon Linux, default tenancy Reserved Instances in us-east-1

The Reserved Instance benefits are applied in the following ways:

The discount and capacity reservation of the four m3.large Reserved Instances is used by the four m3.large instances because the attributes (instance size, region, platform, tenancy) between them match.
The m4.large Reserved Instances provide Availability Zone and instance size flexibility, because they are Amazon Linux Reserved Instances with default tenancy.
An m4.large is equivalent to 4 normalized units/hour.
The customer has purchased four m4.large reserved instances, and in total they are equal to 16 normalized units/hour (4×4). Account A has two m4.xlarge instances running, which is equivalent to 16 normalized units/hour (2×8). In this case, the four m4.large Reserved Instances provide the billing benefit to an entire hour of usage of the two m4.xlarge instances.
The c4.large Reserved Instance in us-east-1 provides Availability Zone and instance size flexibility, because it is an Amazon Linux Reserved Instance with default tenancy, and applies to the c4.xlarge instance. A c4.large instance is equivalent to 4 normalized units/hour and a c4.xlarge is equivalent to 8 normalized units/hour.

In this case, the c4.large Reserved Instance provides partial benefit to c4.xlarge usage. This is because the c4.large Reserved Instance is equivalent to 4 normalized units/hour of usage, but the c4.xlarge instance corresponds with 8 normalized units/hour. Therefore, the c4.large Reserved Instance billing discount applies to 50% of c4.xlarge usage. The remaining c4.xlarge usage is charged at the on-demand rate.

It is interesting to note that regional Linux/Unix Reserved Instances apply to any usage matching the region, tenancy, and platform within the instance family. Reserved Instances are first applied to usage within the purchasing account, followed by qualifying usage in any other account in the payer account. In the case of Reserved Instances that offer size flexibility, there is no preference to the instance size within a family that the Reserved Instances apply. The Reserved Instance discount is applied to qualifying usage that is detected first within payer account. The following example may help explain this.

Scenario Two

A customer is running the following On-Demand Instances in account A:

2 x m4.xlarge Linux, default tenancy instances in Availability Zone us-east-1a

1 x m4.2xlarge Linux, default tenancy instances in Availability Zone us-east-1b

2 x c4.xlarge Linux, default tenancy instances in Availability Zone us-east-1a

1x c4.2xlarge Linux, default tenancy instances in Availability Zone us-east-1b

The customer is running the following On-Demand Instances in account B — a linked account:

2 x m4.xlarge Linux, default tenancy instances in Availability Zone us-east-1a

The customer then purchases the following Reserved Instances in account A:

4 x m4.xlarge Linux, default tenancy Reserved Instances in us-east-1

2 x c4.xlarge Linux, default tenancy Reserved Instances in us-east-1

The Reserved Instance benefits are applied in the following way:

The discount of the four m4.xlarge Reserved Instances is used by the two m4.xlarge instances in account A and the m4.2xlarge instance in account A. All three instances match the attributes (instance family, region, platform, tenancy). There is no capacity reservation.
The discount of the two c4.xlarge Reserved Instances can apply to either the two c4.xlarge instances or the c4.2xlarge instance, all of which match the attributes (instance family, region, platform, tenancy), depending on which usage is detected first by the billing system. There is no preference given to a particular instance size. There is no capacity reservation.

In general, RIs that are owned by an account are applied first to usage in that account. However, if there are qualifying, unused zonal Reserved Instances in other accounts in the payer account, they are applied to the account before regional Reserved Instances owned by the account. This is done to ensure maximum Reserved Instance utilization and a lower bill. For billing purposes, all the accounts in the organization are treated as one account. The following example may help explain this.

Scenario Three

The customer is running the following instance in account A

1 x m4.xlarge Linux, default tenancy instances in Availability Zone us-east-1a

The customer is running the following instance in another linked account B:

1 x m4.xlarge Linux, default tenancy instances in Availability Zone us-east-1b

The customer then purchases the following Reserved Instances in account A:

1 x m4.xlarge Linux, default tenancy Reserved Instance in Availability Zone us-east-1

The customer also purchases the following Reserved Instances in account C:

1 x m4.xlarge Linux, default tenancy Reserved Instances in Availability Zone us-east-1a

The Reserved Instance benefits are applied in the following way:

The discount of the m4.xlarge Reserved Instance owned by account C is applied to the m4.xlarge usage in account A.
The discount of the m4.xlarge Reserved Instance owned by account A is applied to the m4.xlarge usage in account B.
If the Reserved Instance owned by account A was first applied to the usage in account A, the Reserved Instance owned by account C remains unused and usage in account B will be charged at On-Demand rates.

Summary:

Here’re the key highlights summerizing the key aspects of AWS EC2 RIs:

Standard RIs offer you more discounts over any Convertible RIs.
Zonal RIs offer capacity reservation, recommended for larger instance types and if capacity is preferred over discounts.
Regional RIs give more flexibility in managing the RIs.
Convertible RIs give you wide range of options while exchanging but offers you lesser discounts compared to Standard RIs.
Instance size flexibility give you further discounts for Linux/Unix instances for regional RIs and shared tenancy.

Though AWS RIs give you the maximum savings in your cloud cost, if not managed properly, they might lead to unused cost. Planning and managing AWS RIs is tedious task. Analyze & forecast your usage properly before you purchase. After purchasing RIs, you must monitor the usage regularly if the discounts are applied or not.

For better understanding and analysis of RIs, you can take a look at Botmetric’s Cost and Governance RI. It provides wide range of analysis for RI Utilization, unused RI, planning RI based on the metrics like CPU, IO and number of days instance running. It has free 14 day trial.

Editorial Note: This blog post was first published on Medium. To see the original post, click here.

AWS Reserved Instance Management Now Made Easy with Botmetric’s Smart RI

Posted on March 10, 2017August 21, 2017 by Abhinay Dronavally

AWS users using more than 75% RIs in AWS realize the best savings, reveals an internal customer survey by Botmetric. One of the most expensive mistakes that AWS customers make is not using Reserved Instances (RIs) aptly. Just reserving instances does not reap optimum cost savings. A well maneuvered AWS Reserved Instance management plays a major role in reducing the overall cloud spend. But it takes a lot of effort and time when done manually. Don’t worry. Botmetric has your back with its AWS RI Planner.

With much delight, I’d like to introduce Botmetric Smart RI. Using Algorithmic IT Ops (AIOps), it analyzes, modifies, and monitors RIs automatically without you logging into AWS console, thus saving you time and effort that goes in manually modifying the RIs. It does all the heavy-lifting for you using automation so that you save cost optimally, which would have been impossible if done manually.

Simply put, by configuring this app on Botmetric, you can reduce the effort involved in modifying unused RIs, automate modification of RIs as soon as the unused RIs are found (that occur multiple times a day), and above all save cost that could have been wasted due to unnecessary on-demand usage, along with wasted RIs.

Key Objective Behind Building Botmetric Smart RI

Team Botmetric’s motto is to save your cloud cost as much as possible, and also help you govern your RIs and the cost associated with it optimally. Working day-in day-out on RIs, Botmetric team has observed that RIs go unused for two main reasons:

1. Changing Infrastructure Needs: Because, usage patterns change. At times, new instances are added, or few instances need upgradation from time to time as new modules, new features, or new projects are being launched. Sometimes, due to changing business strategy RIs go unused. This leads to wasted RIs and unnecessary on-demand usage and cost.

2. Miscommunication: Most of the times, the engineer who purchased the RI and the engineer who is launching them and monitoring them are different. In such cases, there are high chances of miscommunication between both of them. When instances are launched without the alignment with the purchased RIs, it leads to RI mismatch.

To get the discounted reserved pricing, it is pivotal that it matches the defined rules. For EC2, these rules include Availability Zone (AZ), Scope of Reservation, Platform, Instance Size, and Instance Type. Botmetric scans through your infrastructure for any on-demand instances that are matching two of the three rules required to take price discount of any unused RIs and highlights those instances.

One amazing thing about AWS RIs is you can modify AWS EC2 RIs any number of times at no cost. AWS has introduced this new flexibility in reservations by providing the support for modifying reserved instances, so that you get better savings.

On the other hand, the only solution for unused reservations (RI discount not being applied) is to: reallocate the RI by modifying the RIs to different zones, changing the scope of RIs, or selling the reservations on the marketplace at loss. If you have purchased reserved instances as the newly launched Convertible RI, then you have the ability to convert the instance types as well as platforms, but it may involve fresh cost.

Essentially, modifying RIs involves changing the factors about your reservation with no cost, unless you have new Convertible RI and you are upgrading/downgrading the reservation. In a typical day-to-day AWS reserved instance management, instances needs to be checked one by one and then change the factors accordingly. Few of you might even follow the scheduled monitoring and analysis of RI from time to time too.

It’s critical that you check and evaluate hourly data and create the right modifications. To this end, you will have to create a list of unused reservations and possible modifications. In simple words, you need to create an analysis report of RI in some form and then act upon it.

It is, however, easier said than done!

Here’s why: you need to look for all the probabilities by having the context of list of instance types you are running within a family, then figuring out if there are unused reservations, then figuring out the combination for modifications matching with running on-demand instances. To ease this, Botmetric built Smart RI.

How does Botmetric Smart RI help?

Botmetric Smart RI automatically modifies the reservation as soon as there is a modification available. It smartly manages RIs, which are aligned for discounts, by analyzing the usage, planning, helping with modifications, and monitoring them from time to time.

Essentially, Botmetric Smart RI helps reduce the effort involved in modifying the unused RIs. It automates modification of RIs that occur multiple times a day as soon as the unused RIs are found. It saves you that much amount of cost that could have been wasted due to unnecessary on-demand usage, along with wasted RIs.

To leverage these benefits, you can easily enable Smart RI by providing the permission of “ec2:ModifyReservedInstances” in the policy you attached with the cross account role created for Botmetric.

Apart from helping with AWS Reserved Instance management, Botmetric also provides the capability to track the modified RI details from “Modify History.” You can get details like the time when the reservation was modified, the new combinations created by modification, etc.

Furthermore, Botmetric AWS RI Planner also features other cool capabilities, which not only saves time and weeks of effort but also adds cloud intelligence that helps you with apt RI management, evaluates your cloud utilization, and saves RI cost.

Here they are below, if you’d like to explore them:

Make Confident & Smart RI Plans and Decisions

Using Botmetric AWS RI Planner, you can quickly identify key data that helps with RI planning from your existing infrastructure, all from one single console. Botmetric performs intelligent AIOps on your RI usage, on-demand utilization and existing reserved instances. For each AWS account, Botmetric runs various analysis for all relevant EC2 or RDS machines, and provide you with recommendations on what kind of RI purchase should be done for a specific server.

Analyze Existing Reserve Instances Portfolio

Using Botmetric AWS RI Planner, you can get a complete view of all the reservations across multiple accounts and multiple AWS regions. It also suggests whether a particular reserved instance is recommended to be renewed or not. Among the list of reservations, you can also know about the RIs that are expiring soon. Additionally, Botmetric also sends a RI expiry alert with the list of reservations expiring in the next 45 days. Furthermore, Botmetric also throws warning messages for RIs that are going to expire in the near future.

Get Recommendations for Unused RIs and Manage them Smartly

Botmetric, using machine learning (ML), keeps track of your RI utilization on a daily basis using your billing data and metadata of current infrastructure. If you have any unused RIs in your accounts, Botmetric detects them and provides recommendations on how these unused RIs of EC2/RDS can be utilized, essentially to reduce your monthly RI spend. Above all, it facilitates you govern and manage unused RIs aptly for maximum savings using Smart RI.

Export Reports to Plan RI Better

With CSV export option, you can download the reports of Plan RI recommendations, so that you can share it with your team. This will allow you to analyze what should be planned for RI purchase based on your utilization patterns and business needs.

EC2 Reserved Instance Change History

With the EC2 RI Change History, you can get a list of all the EC2 RI modifications performed on Botmetric. Apart from the details associated with each modified EC2 RI, the console also allows you to filter data by Linked Accounts, status, and action initiated, for better understanding of modified EC2 RIs.

Analyze RI Utilization Data

Using Botmetric AWS RI Planner, you can quickly analyze your entire RI portfolio and utilization from single graphical view in a matter of minutes. Botmetric recommends you to purchase RI for more machines to reduce your monthly spend, and the top RI recommendations, along with a visualization on on-demand vs. reserved hours.

Concluding Thoughts

You can access the Smart RI app and RI Planner from Cost & Governance product in the Botmetric Cloud Management Platform. If you are looking for that one AWS Reserved Instance management that can help you save optimally, then Botmetric AWS RI Planner is the one. Do take the 14-day trial to experience it first hand. If you are already a Botmetric customer, then do try it and share your feedback below in the comment section or tweet to us @BotmetricHQ . We’d be happy to know how it’s working for you and what we can do to make it better to suit your needs.

A free copy of RI guide is up for a grab, if you’re looking to know about RIs in-depth. Hurry!

Reserving AWS Instances to Save Cloud Spend is an Art

Posted on May 18, 2016August 21, 2017 by Tarun G

Elasticity, security, reliability, and other features like the ability to reserve AWS instances have helped AWS cloud to gain a strong foothold across various verticals. Today, AWS is at the helm of the cloud arena for the agility it brings to enterprises’ world.

If you are an enterprise looking to save cost on AWS cloud infrastructure but do not know how to go about it, then you have come to the right place. In this blog post, we will uncover some of the secrets behind the art of reserving AWS instances, and how Botmetric can help you optimize your cloud spend.

Reserving AWS Instances

AWS allows you to reserve instances, in advance, just so that you have access to enough capacity when you need it. It also offers the discounted usage pricing for as long as organizations own the Reserved Instances. This allows users to predict compute costs for the duration of reservation.

Using AWS Reserved Instances, enterprises can reserve EC2 computing capacity for 1 or 3 years. This can be done to get a substantial discount of up to 75 percent in comparison with on-demand instance pricing. This is critical for maintaining workloads in the organizations. More so, enterprises can have reassurance in their capability to kick off the number of instances they reserved when they require them the most.

There are two types of reserved instances:

Standard Reserved Instances

Users can access these instances any time. They can be launched 24 hours/day x 7 days/week. These instances offer enterprises the elasticity to run the required number of instances. Additionally, they can be launched whenever they are required, including during steady state workloads.

Scheduled Reserved Instances

These instances are available for access only within stipulated time windows they have been reserved for. They permit users to match their capacity reservation to a straight chronic schedule. This only needs a fraction of a day, a week, or a month. For instance, scheduled Reserved Instances need to run on the first five days of the month, for any expected workload, or scheduling nightly bill processing from 4pm-12am each weekday.

Based on the reservation type and budget allocation, you can choose a pricing model of AWS Reserved Instances. There are three types of the pricing model, namely All Upfront, Partial Upfront, and No Upfront.

The All Upfront model proposes the highest savings, while partial upfront model provides flexibility and no upfront model is more economical than on-demand instance pricing.

Despite visibility into types of RIs and their pricing models, it can be an intimidating task to manage and optimize the AWS cloud infrastructure. More so, optimizing costs in AWS can be achieved only by putting all the right things in the right place. And this is an ART!

Well Planned AWS Reserved Instances Optimize Cloud Costs by up to Five Times

To provide enterprises like you with a smart approach towards planning resource reservation on AWS, we at Botmetric offer AWS Reserved Instances Planner (RI Planner).

This is part of our intelligent cloud management suite. It provides data-driven predictive, prescriptive, and preventive recommendations on how best AWS instances, including unused and underused, could be leveraged at the right time to optimize AWS cloud spend. With just a few clicks, it provides visibility into Reserved Instances utilization for on-demand instance hours. Also, it provides a detailed list of all unused resources and suggestions on how it could be optimally used. With all these features summed-up, you can reap maximum savings from your AWS cloud.

Through years of experience, we have learned that reserving EC2 instances and other resources are the best way to save costs. Botmetric offers users Top EC2 Reservation Recommendations and lets them view their AWS reserved instance utilization with respect to on-demand instance hours. Our recommendations can help you in keeping your cloud spending under control, by up to five times. Read our blog on how to diligently plan AWS RIs for cost optimization.

To get the complete picture on how to optimize AWS cloud expenditure using Botmetric, view our exclusive webinar presentation on the ‘Art of Reservation and Cost Optimization on AWS.’

Go ahead, t ry Botmetric today.

Effectively Planning AWS Reserved Instances Optimizes Cloud Costs by 5X

Posted on April 12, 2016August 21, 2017 by Shubham Mittal

AWS Reserved Instances are usually the most successful technique to cut down your AWS infrastructure costs. But sometimes it takes very long to decide the number of reservations needed. And by mistake if wrong amount or types of Reserved Instances are bought, your cost can come very high! This would ultimately lead you to spending more money on your cloud than you save. Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances facilitate reserving Amazon EC2 computing capacity for 1 or 3 years. This is done to get a considerable discount of up to 75% in comparison with On-Demand instance pricing.

Reserved Instances also help in lowering your computing costs significantly. This is very important for your workload and enables you to have a capacity reservation. You can have assurance in your capability to initiate the number of instances you reserved when you require them most.

Why Should You Use Reserved Instances?

Reserved Instances are a very effective medium which serve a great purpose in your business requirements catering to your functional excellence. Time and again they have proved to be very useful for enterprises. Let’s see some of the facts to understand why you should use Reserved Instances.

Cost Effective

Reserved Instances offer you great savings by providing a huge discount of up to 75%. This is higher than the discount offered by On-Demand Instances.

Dependable

Reserved Instances are reliable to use. They give a capacity reservation which enables you to launch the number of reserved instances whenever required.

Flexible

With Reserved Instances, you can have the options to pay for complete, part, or nothing upfront. If you pay more up front, you can save more. In case your requirement changes, you can easily alter or put up for sale your Reserved Instance.

Types of Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances

Usually the Reserved Instance hourly rate is applied based on your uses of Amazon EC2 instance. And this is done when the characteristics of your instance usage go with the characteristics of your Reserved Instances.

Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Choices

With Reserved Instances, you can decide the kind of capacity reservation to fit your functional needs.

Standard Reserved Instances: These instances are accessible any time. You can launch them 24 hours/day x 7 days/week. This choice offers you the flexibility to run the required number of instances you have reserved at any time you require them, including steady state workloads.

Scheduled Reserved Instances: These instances are accessible within the time windows you reserve. This option permits you to match your capacity reservation to a conventional recurring schedule that only needs a fraction of a day, a week, or a month. For example, if you have an expected workload such as a monthly financial risk study, you can schedule it to run on the first five days of the month. Another case would be scheduling nightly bill processing from 4pm-12am each weekday.

Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances and the Reserved Instance Marketplace is a powerful and cost-saving policy which you can adopt to run your business efficiently and save cost. However, before using Reserved Instances or the Reserved Instance Marketplace for your business, you need to make sure that the requirements for purchase and sale have been met. You also must recognize the facts and limitations on specific elements of Reserved Instances and the Reserved Instance Marketplace. This includes seller registration, banking, using the AWS free tier, dealing with cancelled instances, and others.

How to choose pricing of AWS Reserved Instances so that cost can be optimized?

As we mentioned earlier, reservations do not charge based on changing hourly usage. As an alternative, the instance is kept reserved for every hour of the length of the reservation for either one or three years. A low usage fee as compared to on-demand instances fees for each of those hours is charged. This is done as an understanding of upfront and monthly increments, based on the reservation type.

All Upfront: Reimburse for the complete reservation term in a single upfront compensation. This option proposes the highest savings for any business.

Partial Upfront: Reimburse for the part of the reservation term in an upfront compensation and then reimburse for the remainder in monthly installments. This option is a bit costlier as it is more than All Upfront, but less than No Upfront.

No Upfront: Reimburse for the reservation in monthly installments all through the term’s duration. This option is not great for saving but still better than on-demand instance pricing.

You can opt between these three choices depending on your organization’s cost of capital. Also the more you will pay upfront; the more you will be saving. But it doesn’t really matter which option you go ahead with as you will be obliged to pay for 1 or 3 full years of usage when you purchase a Reserved Instance. For most one-year reservations, the break-even point is between 50-80%. This means that if your instance is running for that much time or more, your decision to purchase an RI saved you more money than a traditional on-demand cost model would have.

Thus, planning your AWS Reserved Instances effectively is a crucial cost management strategy. Effectively planning your AWS Reserved Instances will help you optimize your cloud costs by 5x! Done right, it ensures that your business is fiscally prudent.

Botmetric’s AWS Reserved Instances Planner is a data driven intelligent approach towards resource reservation on AWS. It provides you with a list of all the recommended EC2 reservations. Botmetric analyzes your EC2 on-demand utilization and generates recommendation after matching it with your current set of reservations. The data is synced and refreshed multiple times a day. You can also view your AWS Reserved Instances utilization with respect to on-demand instance hours. Botmetric’s AWS RI Planner also gives you a detailed list of all your unused resources with smart modification options that helps you in saving more time in manual analysis as well as save more on your AWS cloud costs.

Besides reservations, Botmetric’s Unused AWS Reserved Instance Analyzer provides you intuitive support to make all possible modifications to your Unused RI with more room for savings per month.

If no possible modification is available for your AWS Reserved Instances then Botmetric’s RI Planner will simply suggest you to sell it via AWS.

To experience how Botmetric intelligently identifies RI modification opportunities based on your day to day utilization, we recommend you to try Botmetric’s Unused RI Analyzer.

You can start a free 14-day Botmetric trial here.

So, until we come back with more updates on Reserved Instances and AWS Cloud Cost Management Best Practices , keep in touch with us on Twitter.