Get recommendations for AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans

The following information outlines how to use Cloudability ’s Reserved Instance (RI) Planner for AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans.

Generate recommendations for AWS EC2

The Cloudability product suite enables optimizing the usage of AWS EC2 Convertible Reserved Instances (CRIs) including cost monitoring, reporting, and recommendations including CRI exchange recommendations. The following information is about enabling and utilizing convertible reserved instance exchange recommendations.

Verify permissions

Before you get started, you'll want to make sure that you have the appropriate ec2:GetReservedInstancesExchangeQuote permission enabled. This permission is required for Cloudability to generate convertible exchange recommendations for either partial or all upfront CRIs.

To check the status of the required permission:

1. Navigate to Settings > Vendor Credentials .
2. Within the AWS tab, select to view the permissions of any relevant accounts.

   

   Accounts that do not have the necessary permissions enabled are identified by anything other than a green checkmark next to the ec2:GetReservedInstancesExchangeQuote line item.

   

   If the required permission is not enabled, you can enable it by regenerating a Cloud Formation template and applying it to the applicable accounts.

   Note:

   After the CloudFormation template is applied and verified by the Cloudability Platform, it will take approximately 1 hour before recommendations appear.

Access Convertible Reserved Instance recommendations

CRI Exchange recommendations are located under Optimize > Reserved Instance Planner.

From the ACTION menu, select EXCHANGE.

Cloudability lists recommendations currently being generated for underutilized EC2 Convertible RIs in your portfolio that can be exchanged to cover exiting on-demand workload, thereby enhancing savings.

Recommendations are generated utilizing your usage, billing, and pricing information along with your specified preferences for the reference time period range, savings threshold percent, and utilization threshold percent. In addition to your organization-specific information and preferences, all CRI exchange recommendations are tuned to:

1. First, minimize upfront or true-up costs.
2. Next, maximizing the savings.
3. Then, minimize complexity.

Increasing the savings or utilization threshold preferences will reduce the number of recommendations generated to only those that meet your specified criteria. If the threshold settings are set at zero, recommendations will all be at or above the breakeven threshold for the remainder of the reservation's term.

• Clear or change the view:
• Make sure the ec2:GetReservedInstancesExchangeQuote permission is enabled for the account you're viewing.
• Make sure at least 1 hour has elapsed since you have applied the CloudFormation template to your AWS account.
• Try adjusting savings and utilization threshold values 0% and ensure you have a valid sample date range specified.

Adjust the RI Planner table

The Main view of the Exchange recommendations within the Reserved Instance Planner provides a listing of current recommendations based on the reference date range, savings, and utilization threshold savings. You can sort and filter the view to more easily find or focus on recommendations that are more important to you.

Sort results

The recommendation can be sorted by clicking the header of any of the columns. For instance, recommendations can be sorted in descending (largest to smallest) order by simply clicking on the Savings column header and reversed to ascending (smallest to largest) ordering by clicking the header a second time.

Filter results

Recommendations can be filtered out so that you are only able to see those containing specific traits in one of two ways from the GUI.

First, selecting any hyperlinked label from one of the columns will add that value to the filters. You can select additional hyperlinked values from other columns to continue to add required values and further refine your filtering, but only one value from each column may be selected at a time. After selecting a value in any column, you'll not be able to add any more from that particular column until you clear the first.

Alternatively, filters can be manually added in the filter configuration pane from within the settings panel by selecting filters in the Reserved Instance Planner sub navigation.

Doing so will open the setting panel on the left side of the page. The filters configuration pane is located at the bottom of the settings panel. Each manually configured filter contains three values that must be selected. 1.) Measure is the unit of measure or column heading. 2.) Operator is the critical test (for example, equals, not equal to, greater than, etc.) 3.) Value is the alphanumeric value by which all entries are tested within the measure.

Select Add Filter to begin. Select the Measure and Operator from the drop-down menus that you wish to filter by and enter a value, then click Submit .

Removing filters

To remove a filter, click the x next to that filter within the Filters pane of the settings panel.

Navigate CRI recommendation details

The details of Convertible RI recommendations provide the necessary information and steps to execute an exchange, including the existing source reservation details, modifications (if any) required prior to exchange instance types, instance source and target exchange details, cost implications, and expected savings.

Begin by clicking the Details button at the far right of a recommendation from the summary screen to expand the Details view.

The top pane in the Details view provides the detail of the existing source reservation intended to be exchanged as well as a projected savings summary if all of this specific recommendation is implemented.

The next pane, labeled Step 1 details the necessary modify actions (splitting or merging) within the source reservation required prior to exchanging instance types. Within this step, you may see Tooltip icons at the far right of some of the products of the modify action.

These tooltips indicate that this portion of the reservation will be maintained as leftover capacity or to cover the existing workload. You can view the specifics within each tooltip by hovering over them with your pointer.

The bottom pane (Step 2) in the Details view provides the necessary exchange actions as well as the cost (if any) and the projected savings contributed by this portion of the exchange. To navigate between individual exchanges in Step 2, select one of the radio buttons at the left to expand.

Generate recommendations for AWS Savings Plans

AWS Savings Plan

About Instance Size Flexibility Rls

Amazon RDS reserved instances (RIs) now benefit from Instance Size Flexibility (ISF) much in the same way that ISF applies for EC2 instances. We've updated the engine that powers our RI Planner to accommodate the change in our recommendations for RDS instances. Purchasing with the ISF benefit will reduce your administrative overhead and lead you to maximum savings.

What is ISF ?

ISF is a feature of RDS RIs that lets the savings of an RI apply to any size of instance within a family. You automatically get this benefit when you to purchase an RI within the same AWS Region (for both Single-AZ and Multi-AZ configurations), database engine, and instance family. ISF is available for the following database engines: Amazon Aurora, MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle (Bring Your Own License edition).

How does ISF work ?

ISF manages your reservations in a points-based system where a scale determines the units assigned to each size within a family. When you run an instance, db.m3.large for example, any ISF RI within the db.m3 family can apply to the instance and the number of points your RI has relative to the points for the instance size ran determines how much or how many of the RI is consumed by that instance hour. The numbers of normalized units per DB instance size are:

ISF in the RI Planner

In our RI Planner in the RDS tab, we take into consideration ISF when making recommendations. We still analyze your per-second instance usage and take into account your entire RI inventory, including ISF and non-ISF RIs, before making a recommendation. For ISF RIs, because any size RI can apply to an instance you run within a family, you’ll no longer need to purchase a variety of sizes and instead can purchase to the family, database, and region based on normalized units. Effectively, you can abstract away the concept of purchasing to your instance type profile and instead just purchase points.

There are a number of ways you could achieve this, but after much internal scenario testing and discussion with our biggest customers, we’ve established an effective pattern that we’ve built into the planner.

In the schematic below, sample usage over a time period helps illustrate how ISF works. For each time unit, imagine you are running a combination of instances. Targeting a waterline is still valid and in the case for 100% RI utilization, we'd recommend you purchase 10 Large RIs, since those are the smallest instance size available. You have one RI purchase and when your normalized usage stays the same or increases, your RIs will remain perfectly utilized.

The RI Planner Details page shows how we apply ISF to an RDS instance.

Our RDS ISF strategy

The philosophy we took with EC2 ISF focused on reducing your management overhead while maximizing your savings. For RDS ISF as well, we make recommendations for the smallest instance size possible and Single-AZ. This allows for maximum coverage with the smallest set of RI parcels. Note that the parcels themselves will be large and you may need to request an increase to your RI purchase limit from Amazon to accommodate the purchase of a large quantity of small instances sizes.

You’ll benefit from a more streamlined RI lifecycle with the purchase of the large quantity, rather than in the past where you would have multiple purchases of a variety of sizes per family. This strategy will also help you better manage your inventory if your usage decreases with the ability to sell off a much more granular number of RI units to fit the new usage patterns.