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Procurement advice

Based on historical resource usage data and market trends, SavingsNow provides recommendations for purchasing AWS Reserved Instances (RI) and Savings Plans. Future plans will also cover commitment products from other cloud providers, such as GCP Committed Use Discounts (CUD). These recommendations help enterprises lock in future cloud resource costs through prepayment, mitigating the risks of price fluctuations and achieving long-term cost savings. The FlaxSave feature utilizes intelligent analysis and forecasting to ensure enterprises can purchase cloud resources at the best time and price, further reducing cloud costs.

RI recommendations (AWS)​

Note: Reserved Instances (RI) is a billing method provided by AWS, and not a type of instance. It allows users to prepay for AWS resources (e.g., EC2 instances, RDS, DynamoDB, RedShift, etc.) in exchange for resource reservation and fee discounts within a region, within a specific Availability Zone, or across Availability Zones.

The RI suggestion function analyzes and calculates the reserved capacity of specific resources based on their usage and business requirements within the cloud provider AWS. To help users fully benefit from Reserved Instances (RI), it provides clear and intuitive RI purchase suggestions.

To ensure timely updates, a [manual Update] option is available at the top right of the page, allowing users to refresh the recommendation results themselves (limited to once per hour).

Overview​

For AWS cloud products (cloud-limited servers), the system provides procurement suggestions based on various combinations of purchase duration, instance type, payment type, and analysis period. It also offers cost analysis data under these suggestions, including:

  • Current estimated monthly expenditure
  • Optimized estimated monthly expenditure
  • Optimized estimated monthly savings
  • Optimized estimated monthly savings proportion

These insights help users make informed purchasing decisions to optimize their cloud costs.

RI recommendations list​

The RI recommendation list provides procurement recommendations for resource instances based on optimization analysis across different cloud accounts with AWS.

An RI recommendation includes: Cloud vendor, Cloud account, Optimization advice, Instance type, Region, Platform, Lease, Size adjustable or not, current generation or not, Expiration date (1-3 years), Payment options (full prepaid, Partial prepaid, No prepaid), Service Type (standard or convertible), analysis period (7\30\60 days), prepaid fee, estimated monthly savings.

The list can also be sorted by prepayment amount or estimated monthly savings, helping users to prioritize recommendations based on their financial and operational needs.

Additionally, to address the potential large number of resources that need optimization, users can freely combine different filter conditions based on cloud account, instance type, region, platform, and other dimensions. This allows for more accurate resource retrieval and targeted procurement actions.

RI recommendation subscription​

The RI recommendation feature supports subscriptions, allowing users to receive RI recommendation results via email as XLS attachments. As a subscriber, you can follow these steps to set up your subscription:

  • Click the [Subscribe] button above the RI recommendation list to open the subscription drawer page.
  • Toggle the [Subscribe] switch at the top to enable further subscription settings.
    • Sending Frequency: Choose the frequency (daily, weekly, or monthly). Each frequency needs to be set to send at a precise time.
    • Cloud Service: Currently, only one cloud server is supported, with plans to support more in the future.
    • Validity Period: Select either 1 year or 3 years.
    • Service Categories: Support both standard and convertible categories.
    • Payment Options: Select from full prepayment, partial prepayment, or no prepayment.
    • Analysis Period: Choose from 7 days, 30 days, or 60 days.
  • Click the "Confirm" button to complete the subscription operation. Alternatively, click "Cancel" to discard the configuration.

Note: RI suggested subscriptions take at least 10 minutes to take effect. If you need to receive subscription messages on the same day, pay close attention to the sending time configuration.

RI recommendations downloading​

Click the [Download] button at the top right of the RI recommendations list to download a CSV file containing all RI recommendations for local viewing.

SP recommendation (AWS)​

Note: AWS Savings Plans are a flexible pricing model designed to help customers save on compute costs. By committing to consistent computing usage over a period of one or three years (e.g., at a rate of $10/hour), customers can enjoy a discount that is lower than the pay-as-you-go model. This pricing model can be applied to various AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon Fargate, AWS Lambda, and AWS SageMaker.

The SP suggestion function analyzes and calculates the reserved capacity of specific resources based on their usage and business requirements within the cloud provider AWS. It provides users with clear and intuitive Savings Plans (SP) purchase suggestions to maximize the discounts offered by SP.

To ensure timely updates, a [manual Update] option is available at the top right of the page, allowing users to refresh the recognition results themselves (limited to once per hour).

Overview​

For the two typical types of AWS Savings Plans (Compute Savings Plans and EC2 Instance Savings Plans), the system provides purchase suggestions based on various combinations of purchase duration, type, payment type, and analysis period. The cost analysis data under these suggestions includes:

  • Current estimated monthly expenditure
  • Optimized estimated monthly expenditure
  • Optimized estimated monthly savings
  • Optimized estimated monthly savings proportion These insights help users make informed purchasing decisions to optimize their cloud costs.

SP recommendations List​

The SP recommendation list provides procurement suggestions based on optimization analysis across different AWS cloud accounts.

Each SP recommendation includes: cloud vendor, cloud account, SP type, instance family, region, expiration date (1-3 years), payment option (full prepaid, partial prepaid, and no prepaid), service type (standard or convertible), analysis period (7\30\60 days), prepaid fee, and estimated monthly savings.

The list can also be sorted by prepayment amount or estimated monthly savings, allowing users to prioritize recommendations based on their financial and operational needs.

Considering the large number of procurement suggestions for different SP types, users can also apply various filtering conditions to retrieve more accurate resource procurement suggestions. Filters can be applied based on:

  • Cloud Account
  • Instance Family
  • Region This enables users to perform targeted procurement actions with greater precision.

SP recommends subscriptions​

The SP proposal feature supports subscriptions, allowing users to receive SP proposal results via email as XLS attachments. Follow these steps to set up your subscription:

  • Click the [Subscribe] button above the SP recommendation list to open the subscription drawer page.
  • Toggle the [Subscribe] switch at the top to enable further subscription settings.
    • Sending Frequency: Choose the frequency (daily, weekly, or monthly). Each frequency needs to be set to send at a precise time.
    • SP Type: Includes Compute Savings Plans and EC2 Instance Savings Plans.
    • Validity Period: Select either 1 year or 3 years.
    • Payment Options: Select from full prepayment, partial prepayment, or no prepayment.
    • Analysis Period: Choose from 7 days, 30 days, or 60 days.
  • Click the "Confirm" button to complete the subscription operation. Alternatively, click "Cancel" to discard the configuration.

Note: SP suggested subscriptions take at least 10 minutes to take effect. So if you need to receive subscription messages the same day, pay attention to the sending time configuration.

Click the [Download] button at the top right of the SP recommendations list to download a CSV file containing all the SP recommendations for opening and viewing locally.