Savings Plans & Reservations
The Savings Plans & Reservations page helps your organization to track its usage of these two cost-saving mechanisms in AWS. To access detailed purchasing recommendations for Reserved Instances and Savings Plans, see Accessing Savings Plans and Reserved Instances Recommendations.
Savings Plans
This feature is not available for Cost and Compliance Module customers using AWS legacy Detailed Billing Reports (DBR). Customers wishing to use Stax's Savings Plans feature should migrate to Cost and Usage Reports (CUR).
The Savings Plans tab provides visualizations representing the AWS Savings Plans your organization has purchased, and how they are applied to your consumption across the AWS Organization. Using the date picker, you can select a date range, up to three years in the past, to visualize Savings Plans data.
The Overview panel shows you all of the Savings Plans your organization has purchased for the given period, in addition to their utilization, total commitment, and net savings.
The Utilization panel shows how well utilized the given Savings Plans are. 100% utilization of a Savings Plan indicates that all of its committed consumption is being taken advantage of. You can toggle between percentage (%) and dollar amount, in USD, ($) view.
The Cost panel can be viewed in either Charges or Amortized Costs modes. Charges displays unblended costs. That is, applicable upfront payment for Savings Plans that are either all upfront or partial upfront, and in the month they were charged to your AWS bill. Amortized Costs mode includes applicable upfront charges for all upfront and partial upfront Savings Plans, as well as recurring subscription fees, distributed evenly over the period of the plan. You can toggle between Charges and Amortized Costs view.
The On-Demand Spend Equivalent panel shows the total AWS unblended On-Demand cost offset by purchasing the Savings Plan. It allows you to better understand what you would have paid for eligible usage had you not purchased Savings Plans.
The Savings panel shows the realized savings on eligible usage covered by your Savings Plans. This compares the the standard on-demand cost and the discounted Savings Plan eligible usage cost to understand the effectiveness of your Savings Plans.
For a detailed description of each panel and examples to help you understand your Savings Plan data visit Understanding Savings Plans in Stax.
Reservations
The Reserved Instances tab shows cost saving opportunities through the purchase of EC2 Reserved Instances (RIs), as well as how completely the organization's EC2 consumption is covered by those RIs. Consider AWS's EC2 Reserved Instances documentation to gain a thorough understanding of what RIs are and how they can provide cost savings.
Stax provides, on the Reserved Instances tab, the following information to help you understand your EC2 Reserved Instances position:
The EC2 Usage Covered by Reserved Instances panel shows an aggregate of the normalized virtual CPU (vCPU) hours for all EC2 instances in the environment. This allows Stax to represent instances of all sizes in the same graph. The normalized vCPU hours value is calculated by taking the amount of time an instance was running during a given period, then multiplying that by the number of vCPU cores present in the instance type. This chart is not a representation of cost or cost savings, but rather a representation of volume of compute and its coverage by RIs.
The Saving Opportunities panel represents the Reserved Instances types that may be considered for purchase. It breaks down recommendations to show the potential RI coverage on the y-axis (vertical axis), and RI cost on the x-axis (horizontal axis). Put simply, Stax recommends you purchase the RI with the largest circle on the graph. This, of course, does not consider your organization's unique requirements and position, and it does not represent any savings already made as a result of Savings Plans or other cost saving measures.
The Purchase These Reserved Instances to Reduce Spend table provides a list of recommended Reserved Instances purchases. This is retrieved from the AWS Reserved Instances API. It shows the current Reserved Instances coverage for given instance types and families (e.g. m5.2xlarge and r5 family).
In all cases, it is crucial to apply business knowledge and understanding to the recommendations on the Reserved page before making any purchases.
Considerations
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In many cases, Savings Plans provides a more comprehensive and financially favorable approach to usage commitments in AWS. Consider your use case to determine whether a Savings Plan purchase would be more effective than Reserved Instances
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Recommendations presented in Stax are generated from the AWS Organization's management account and are scoped to all AWS accounts within the organization
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Reserved Instances can be purchased at either the AWS Organization's management account or at an individual account within the Organization. RIs applied to the management account cannot be applied to specific instances or AWS accounts within the organization. Consider how this may impact any chargeback/showback models when purchasing Reserved Instances
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Recommendations presented in Stax refer to Standard RIs over a 1-year term with the No Upfront payment option