For years, one of the most popular ways to reduce spend in AWS has been Reserved Instances (RIs). Many users love the immense discounts that come with RIs but struggle with usage restrictions, lack of flexibility, and the amount of time spent managing them over their lifetime. While the release of Convertible RIs looked to provide users with greater flexibility compared to their predecessor (the Standard RI), they still carried some usage restrictions and had to be monitored consistently over time.
AWS released a new offering, called Savings Plan, to provide greater flexibility to users while offerings the same cost savings as Reservations. There are two types of Savings Plans, EC2 Instance Savings Plans and Compute Savings Plan, both of which remove usage restrictions and time spent managing.
For a more in-depth look at AWS Savings Plans, including a breakdown of the two types of Savings Plans and how they differ from RIs, read this blog.
How Groupware Technology is taking advantage of AWS Savings Plans
At CloudHealth’s recent CloudLIVE conference, Groupware Technology’s John McGivern (Sr. Director Cloud Billing & Optimization Services) and Parker Stevens (Cloud Systems Engineer) led a session on AWS Savings Plans, diving deep into Compute Savings Plan purchases and what this new discount flexibility means for organizations.
Watch the full CloudLIVE Virtual Session (below) with McGivern and Stevens to learn:
- How to estimate your commitments
- How to make Savings Plan purchases
- How to track your purchases
- How to track your usage and savings
To open and view this video in a new tab, click here.
Groupware has found a lot of success using CloudHealth’s new Savings Plan Recommendations engine and analysis framework, which ensures organizations gain the maximum benefit from their Savings Plan purchases, helps them make decisions based on key KPIs, and tracks and accounts for Savins Plan usage over time.
To learn more about how CloudHealth is helping customers take advantage of AWS Savings Plans, read our Savings Plans Recommendations announcement blog here.
Groupware’s tip: understand account affinity
To properly understand how your Savings Plan purchases are applied to your infrastructure, you need to first understand account affinity. When you purchase a Savings Plan discount, the savings are going to first apply to the account in which the Savings Plan was purchased before moving on to your other accounts.
For example, let’s say you have an account with M5s in it, another with X1s, and a third account with C4s. If you were to make a Savings Plan purchase, and you were to buy that from the M5 account, the Savings Plan would apply the savings to all the instances in that account first (in this example the M5s), and only when the M5 account was exhausted would your Savings Plan purchase be applied to your X1 account, and finally your C4 account.
So what do you do about this? How do you get around account affinity to ensure that you’re maximizing your Savings Plan purchases (essentially how can you target your Savings Plan purchases)?
Create an Admin Account, this is something Amazon has also recommended for some time, and make your Savings Plan purchases from that account. Why? If you have an Admin account with no physical resources, you can make your Compute Saving Plans purchases from that account and it will immediately leave that account and go to the highest savings first. This is a best practice that Groupware has used with their customers to ensure that each Savings Plan purchase is maximized.
Why we love AWS Savings Plans
Put simply, a lot of restrictions that come with Standard (and in some cases Convertible) RIs are removed with EC2 Instance Savings Plans—with even more restrictions disappearing with Compute Savings Plans.
“Savings Plans provide incredible flexibility, allowing you to run what you want, where you want, on the technologies you want.”
Sr. Director Cloud Billing & Optimization Services
Using AWS Savings Plans in the real world
During Groupware’s CloudLIVE presentation, Stevens highlights one of the many benefits of AWS Savings Plans—region flexibility—by talking through a real-life use case.
One of Groupware’s customers was working with a customer of their own who had some POCs running in some of AWS’s more remote regions and were looking to cut down some of their costs. Unfortunately, this customer was only planning on being in this remote region for 6 months, a challenge when you consider that they would have to commit to a 1-year RI in order to receive a discount on On-Demand compute costs (an obvious waste considering their 6-month timeline) or spend the money to run all their compute at On-Demand prices for the duration of the project.
Thankfully, Compute Savings Plans no longer restricts discounts to a specific region (remember, compute anywhere in the world is accessible to these discounts), which is great if you are only running in regions for a short period of time. This flexibility is great if you have a global footprint, and this customer was able to take advantage of compute discounts for the months they were running in that AWS region.
The bottom line is that Savings Plans offer you a safety net so you can be innovative without losing money because of restrictive commitments. Without all the monitoring that came with EC2 RIs, your organization can simply focus on the technology—while saving money—without hindering your innovation.
To learn more about AWS Savings Plans, check out our eBook The Ultimate Guide To AWS Savings Plans.
