A Procurement perspective

AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans are a useful way to reduce cloud costs in exchange for a commitment to use specific services or spend an agreed amount over a 1 or 3 year term. When usage is variable and hard to predict benefitting from these discounts is challenging with traditional approaches.

We combine the different RI & SP types and options to access the highest 3 year discount rates without creating large, fixed, long-term lock-in for future cloud use. As a result we can confidently cover high proportions of your usage with discounts knowing that we can adjust commitments as needed to adapt to usage changes and avoid wastage. 

Traditional RI & SP commitment approaches rely on precise usage forecasting at individual application, service or environment levels. This reflects who has the best understanding of usage needs, but it creates inefficiency, missed opportunity and inconsistency of approach.

Each team must complete its own forecasting, approval and optimization processes. Competing priorities mean optimization becomes an occasional, often reactive activity. Uncertainties of future usage and non-specialist knowledge of how to make best use of the available RI & SP options force teams to add their own margin for error with low coverage levels. There is no way to account for usage elsewhere so economies of scale are lost.