Saving Plans, hourly granularity and recommendations: the new AWS innovations

To enhance its Cloud Cost Management offering and enable users to better control their AWS expenses, Amazon regularly develops new features to enhance its product range. Since July 2019, AWS has developed three features that allow users to better control their Cloud invoices. If you use the Amazon platform, here are some explanations of the latest AWS Cost Management features: recommendations, saving plans and hourly granularity.

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Optimization recommendations

To enable its customers to optimize their Cloud architecture to better control their budget, AWS now offers an optimization recommendation interface directly integrated with its Cloud Cost Management tool.

This tool identifies two main types of cloud instances with optimization potential: "useless" and "underutilized" resources. AWS presents as useless a resource used at less than 1% of its total capacity. The "under-utilised" category includes resources used between 1% and 40% of their total capacity.

This categorization of cloud resources allows AWS to provide separate recommendations. As part of an unnecessary resource, Amazon's Cost Explorer will simply advise you to turn off your instance to limit waste. As part of an underutilized resource, AWS will instead direct you towards a logic of resizing your product, to better match your real needs. This is generally referred to as "rightsizing" Cloud instances.

The AWS recommendation interface presents the information as follows:

the number of opportunities detected
an estimate of the achievable monthly savings
a total percentage of the possible savings

This prioritisation of information therefore allows you to get a quick overview of your potential for improvement and to act accordingly. Your optimization list can also be downloaded in CSV format directly to the Cost Explorer AWS.

An effective tool to prioritize your actions and implement a coherent action plan.

Amazon Saving Plans

AWS users are all familiar with Instance Booking. It allows everyone to engage in the use of a specific instance, over a period of 1 to 3 years, while benefiting from a significant reduction on the overall price. This feature allows users to reduce their cloud budget by planning their needs in advance.

But the lack of flexibility and the difficulties related to the lack of visibility can sometimes slow down the enthusiasm of some users. To address this issue, AWS now offers Saving Plans, a kind of improved IR.

Where Instance Reservation offers you a discounted commitment to a very specific instance, Saving Plans now allow you to commit to Compute or EC2 products, by allowing you to integrate or delete instances within your plan.

For Compute products, you can benefit from a discount of up to -66% on the initial price, with no limit on instance instance family (you can go from c5 to m5), OS or region (you can migrate from EU - Dublin to EU - London for example)

For EC2 products, you can benefit from a discount of up to -72%, with no size limit (switch from m5.xl to m5.4xl without any problem) or OS.

In other words, you invest a defined amount in a type of product, with real flexibility on the strategy to adopt. You can then decide to spend your money according to your needs, without closing the door to a change in your strategy.

The advantage of Saving Plans over Instance Booking? Flexibility and better visibility into future cloud spending. A good practice to improve your Cloud Cost Management strategy.

Support for hourly granularity

Always with a view to improving visibility on your Cloud invoicing, AWS now proposes to go further in the analysis of your expenses by offering hourly granularity.

Directly available in the AWS Cost Manager, via the "Settings" tab, the implementation of time granularity on your account will allow you to more precisely identify your consumption behavior to make the best decisions. Available over the last 14 days, this tool allows you to dive deeper into your billing data to help you manage your AWS Cloud architecture.

This hourly granularity allows you, for example, to identify your Cloud expenses on time boards outside of peak consumption periods, such as at night. This increased visibility allows you to draw quick conclusions about the optimization potential of your AWS ecosystem.

Please note that this service is charged $0.01 USD for each group of 1000 requests. An additional blur line on your monthly invoice.

How to overcome the blur of multi-cloud?

You are an AWS user and you are interested in these features, but your company's multi-cloud environment slows you down and you waste a lot of time managing and optimizing your expenses? Would you like to be able to work on your AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud products at the same time? Our Cloud Cost Management platform offers you many features to optimize your architecture without juggling between different vendors.

Save time by centralizing and standardizing your billing data and reduce your Cloud invoices easily with our many financial management features. Would you like to know more about our solution? Contact our team now to find out more!