- Ian Brodie
- March 23, 2020
Since the launch of AWS Savings Plans in late 2019, we’ve seen hundreds of companies begin to incorporate this new cost saving tool. Today we are excited to announce that we have further integrated Savings Plans into the Apptio Cloudability product to include recommendations that can help you better understand available options and save money on cloud resources. This new functionality joins our existing suite of Savings Plan capabilities, including the surfacing, allocation, and amortization of Savings Plan-related costs.
Balancing your portfolio across both reservations and Savings Plans, while knowing the levers available to achieve the right coverage, is essential to ensuring that you maximize the value of your cloud investment. Cloudability is built to provide a unified platform for cost optimization of spend and usage-based commitments (e.g., Reserved Instances), designed with the administration, governance, analysis, planning, and execution of these commitments in mind. Cloudability has further extended the value we deliver across this lifecycle with our addition of Savings Plans recommendations:
Administration
Organizations need the right account structures and permissions, so users have the appropriate access and see only the data that’s important to them. Cloudability’s Savings Plan recommendations natively map to your established account and view structure so that you can filter recommendations based on role, team, cost center, and many other dimensions right out of the box. All necessary permissions are included in the automatically generated CloudFormation templates. With this in mind, enabling Savings Plan recommendations in Cloudability requires little to no additional effort to implement.
Leverage views to filter recommendations by role, cost center, and a myriad of other dimensions.
Governance
Organizations need to measure the payoff of commitments to ensure they are maximizing available discounts and meeting goals based on their success criteria, such as utilization achieved. Cloudability’s Savings Plan recommendations include an executive view of key performance metrics such as net savings, upfront fees, recommended purchases, and estimated savings. These metrics respond to any custom filters you apply, making it easy to determine the performance of both current and future Savings Plan purchases.
Get an overview of your Savings Plan purchases and recommendations
Analysis and Planning
Planning future spend commitments requires consideration of a variety of factors to ensure you’re making smart decisions that will be beneficial to your business in the long run. Beyond historical and forecasted usage and spend, factors such as existing assets, custom pricing, and desired coverage influence what ‘optimal’ is for your organization.
Cloudability’s integrated recommendations are customized to reflect not only your historical usage, custom pricing, and preferences, but also to account for usage-based commitments already purchased. This helps maintain your desired coverage rate and prevents the purchase of unnecessary commitments. Further, as resource requirements, pricing, available technology, and organizational goals are continuously evolving, companies need the agility to quickly compare multiple commitment options and scenarios as priorities change. Cloudability provides the necessary controls to quickly change and toggle between Savings Plans options including term length, type/payment model, and compare options with a few clicks. Further, rich visualizations help you understand the forecasted impact of purchased Savings Plans on your organization.
Quickly filter your recommendations to your specific needs.
Execution
Making the leap from viewing an optimization recommendation to actually implementing the necessary changes can be challenging. Collaborating with stakeholders to communicate needed purchases or dealing with the ramifications of a mistake in purchasing presents many challenges. For this reason, Cloudability has generated prescriptive recommendations that include detailed instructions and an expected outcome to ensure frictionless execution. Savings Plan recommendations are no different. Whether working from the in-application view or from a .csv export, each recommendation includes the recommended Savings Plan type, term, payment model, family (EC2 plans only), region (EC2 plans only), upfront cost, total commitment, and expected savings amount/percentage.
Dig into Savings Plan details to understand commitment, savings, and utilization.
AWS Savings Plans are a great addition to the cost savings vehicles available to help organizations optimize their cloud spend. Their inherent flexibility of operating system, instance size, region, and even service provide a compelling proposition for organizations with evolving needs. Cloudability seamlessly integrates the benefits of Savings Plans with its best-in-class data platform for enabling distributed IT, finance, and business teams to optimize their costs and communicate the business value of cloud. The platform simplifies applying cloud cost optimization best practices and shortens the path to getting the most value out of the latest technology and tools released by cloud providers.
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