Automate your savings

Automate provides cost optimization for any AWS service for which a Reserved Instance (RI) or Savings Plan (SP) can be purchased. You remain free to use any other AWS services you wish. AWS provides more options to mitigate lock-in risk (e.g. scope of eligible services, changing or selling commitments) for EC2, Fargate and Lambda so we manage these “core services” entirely autonomously. As there are fewer options available for other services eligible for commitments like RDS and Opensearch, “additional services”, we confirm our actions with you before proceeding.

We have never found an organization we couldn’t create additional savings for. How much we could actually save you entirely depends on what you use, how you use it and how well optimized you already are.
Rather than guess or overstate the potential with unrealistic, best case scenarios we’ve made it easy for you to receive a tailored evidence-based report.

Our free Savings Review walks you through the process of granting the light touch access we need to your AWS Cost and Usage Report. With this metadata we need no access to the data within your accounts to provide a detailed overview. In the results you’ll see how well optimized you are, receive insights into your current approach and see projections about what more we could do for you. 

It’s important to remember that savings are not just financial. With the time we also save you from having to manage this yourself and the flexibility we create to avoid lock-in to services/spend you’ll be far better equipped to follow more strategic objectives.

Coverage is often used as if it is the metric to define how efficient a commitment strategy is. The reality is that it is just one metric. It is important to consider other metrics as well:

Utilization (%): the benefit of commitments is applied on an hourly basis. Utilization is an expression of how many hours you had cloud usage to which the commitment could be applied. The goal here is not necessarily 100%. Each commitment has a different tipping point in utilization where the overall effect switches from positive to negative. Striving only for 100% would mean missing out on some savings potential.

Wastage ($): the cost associated with commitments where their utilization is so low that it is costing you more than it is saving. This should be minimized wherever possible.
Discount (%): what saving off the undiscounted (on-demand) rate is being realized.

Our aim is to maximize coverage, utilization and discount % whilst minimizing wastage. Ultimately the key metric to measure how effective your approach to rate optimization is how much do you save overall compared to the undiscounted, on-demand rate.

Our free savings review will help you understand what this would mean for you in a quick and easy, but secure process.

The secret is intense usage monitoring, automated actions to respond to changes, making use of all available Reserved Instance and Savings Plan commitment buying and selling options whilst staggering commitment end dates to allow more precise control.

In this way we can balance discount and lock-in risk whilst avoiding making commitments to large amounts of spend beyond just the short term. With carefully managed strategies this strikes the balance that suits your environment and gives you savings without compromising your flexibility to change how you use the cloud. Learn more.

We’re so confident in our approach that our fee accounts for both savings and wastage. If we take an approach that generates wastage it reduces our fee. This is not capped, even to the point that we would provide credits should the wastage exceed the savings in the extremely unlikely event that this occurred.

Our approach uses your historical data to build trends to inform decisions about future usage and guide our commitment strategy. It can run entirely from this without any forecast information.

The past is not always a good predictor of the future though. It will not predict any significant changes in your usage as a result of a planned migration or a shutdown of a legacy system for example. Inevitably, when working off historical data there will be a lag in identifying such a change and taking action to adjust. This lag will introduce temporary inefficiencies.

Our approach enables you to provide insights on significant upcoming changes like this that our systems can incorporate and adjust for so you’re always optimized.

It is true that AWS provides lots of tools to help you see where Reserved Instance and Savings Plan commitments might make you savings.

Many organizations could do more themselves, but in reality often they don’t and we find savings at every organization we review. The reason for this is not tooling (there’s plenty of recommendation engines out there) and not choice (you can choose from 26 ways to buy commitments).

Our experience suggest it’s a combination of:

• Time: Organizations have limited time and people with the right skills available to explore and act on recommendations. This is what we do, it’s our dedicated focus and we have the tools to manage it efficiently so that we can take it off your hands.
• Risk: Traditional ways of making commitments needs confident forecasting to predict future usage and to avoid wastage. The risk of getting it wrong stops many from taking any action or makes them overly conservative in their commitment management. We have many ways to forecast and reduce risk of commitments so you can confidently access the best savings.
• ROI: Savings achieved must be worth the time and money spent achieving them. Any time and resources spent optimizing cloud cost is time not spent leveraging cloud potential. The losses from this can be far greater than the savings made. 

The result is that organizations pay for flexibility they don’t need or take a simplistic approach that limits future choice.

We do rate optimization for you so your team is free to focus elsewhere. We have dedicated teams using tools we’ve developed for this specific purpose to use on your behalf. We can take the entire commitment management process away from you and build shared incentives to create sustainable long-term success.

Your teams can use this time and the flexibility we create to focus on other areas of cost optimization (e.g. rightsizing, scheduling, modernization or rearchitecting) or driving your organization forward in other ways that requires their specific internal expertise.

Our service is secure and non-intrusive. We require no access to the data within your accounts. You retain independent control of our access. You create the roles we need, and can remove them at any time you wish.

We use an AWS best practice RBAC, IAM and SCP approach to grant access on a non-intrusive, least-privilege basis. Our access is defined in the following templates which create clearly defined roles to serve the following purposes, each for a single, named Strategic Blue account:

Read data about your payer account:
List accounts and their tags, describe cost and usage report definitions and read the S3 bucket that holds those reports (CloudFormation).

Validate data with Cost Explorer:
Used to verify our optimization actions have been correctly applied by AWS, view usage, billing and savings plan information (CloudFormation).

Commitment-holding account access control:
Any reserved instances or savings plans we purchase to access discounts are registered to “Commitment Holding Accounts” used exclusively by us. We may ask your team to create some AWS accounts, under your payer account that will always remain owned by you. We may also ask you to invite additional accounts that will always be owned by us into your organization. For your convenience and transparency, as our customer, your Portal homepage summarizes the commitments in holding accounts you own.

We have admin access to these accounts so that we can buy, exchange and modify Reserved Instances and Savings Plans. If you prefer you can grant a reduced level of access using this (CloudFormation).

Reserved Instance Marketplace
We can optionally grant our commitment-holding accounts the ability to sell unused Reserved Instances on the AWS RI Marketplace as a further method of improving efficiency if your usage changes (CloudFormation).

Our approach and entire business model revolve around maximizing discounts while minimizing unnecessary wastage. Our fee accounts for both savings and wastage. If we take an approach that generates wastage it reduces our fee. This is not capped, even to the point that we would provide credits should the wastage exceed the savings in the extremely unlikely event that this occurred.

Automate is provided via our Master Business Service Agreement on a 36 month initial term. It is available under English, Delaware or California Law. Under this Agreement we take sole charge of the buying and selling of Reserved Instance and Savings Plan commitments into dedicated commitment holding AWS accounts. In brief summary:

You:

• remain under your existing AWS Customer Agreement terms and conditions (or equivalent)
• provide regular high level usage forecasts (including >5 days notice of any material changes)
• must meet the Automate Service Plan Qualification Criteria in our Service Description. This description is incorporated into your contract and covers service delivery, deliverables, roles and responsibilities

We:

• charge a monthly fee calculated as a share of the savings from Reserved Instances and Savings Plans
• reserve a right for early termination if you fail to meet high level forecast requirements should they result in persistent losses
• have a termination compensation provision for customer default or for customer convenience may withdraw Automate if there is a material change to AWS’ product(s) that means our commitment strategy cannot be supported

We may ask your team to create some AWS accounts under any payer account we will be optimizing. These “commitment holding accounts” will be for our exclusive use and will house any Reserved Instances or Savings Plans we purchase to access discounts. They will generate no cloud usage.

You will own these accounts and any reserved instances or savings plans purchased within them. You will implement SCPs we provide so that your AWS usage accounts cannot purchase Reserved Instances or create Savings Plans. This ensures there is no duplication of purchasing that could cause wastage as we manage all this for you. We may also make use of similar accounts that we always own.

The use of these accounts makes it possible for us to manage commitments efficiently. It also helps minimize our access to your environment, creates clear isolation from your data/usage accounts and enables you to easily, and independently audit our activities if required.

Onboarding with us will not affect your current AWS invoice process.

You will receive Strategic Blue invoices for the Automate fee before the 7th day of the calendar month. Payment is on 30 day terms with a 1% late fee.

No. We can work alongside any Private Pricing you may have.