Today, Vantage announces Autopilot for AWS Savings Plans, a tool that can automatically purchase Compute Savings Plans commitments to optimize EC2 spend, as well as AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate. In response to policy changes from AWS, Autopilot will no longer manage Reserved Instances (RIs), but Vantage customers can opt in to Autopilot for AWS Savings Plans to enable Savings Plan recommendations and automatic purchases. Customers can configure the Savings Plan settings for Vantage to use: 1- or 3-year term lengths; 7, 30, or 60 day lookbacks; and All Upfront, Partial Upfront, or No Upfront payment plans.
Previously, Autopilot could automatically purchase EC2 RIs. Autopilot would aim for optimal discounted coverage, reducing the difficulty of manually managing reservations. Additionally, Autopilot could transfer or sell an unneeded RI to other customers via the RI public marketplace; however, as the policy changes for EC2 RIs came into effect, it became more difficult to sell or transfer RIs. This increased risk for customers if they wanted to change instance types or reduce their overall EC2 footprint.
Autopilot for AWS Savings Plans Recommended Coverage Dashboard
Now, Autopilot can purchase Compute Savings Plans, which provide Vantage customers with a more flexible reservation type. Compute Savings Plans can apply to all instance types in any region, meaning that customers no longer need to go through a cumbersome process of selling RIs if they want to migrate instance types. Autopilot allows Vantage customers to set the Savings Plans configuration to use and toggle automatic purchases. Autopilot helps customers monitor and apply of Savings Plans on an ongoing basis. Savings Plans purchased by Autopilot are subject to the same charge as today—5% of savings realized.
To get started, navigate to the Autopilot page in the console to view existing commitment levels, overall savings rate, and configure Autopilot settings. If you’re a current Autopilot customer with existing RI purchases, you will have the option to opt in to the new Savings Plan model. Autopilot will no longer purchase RIs, and Autopilot will list all RIs for sale after opting in to the Savings Plan model. As RIs migrate out of your account, corresponding usage will be covered subsequently with Savings Plans.
Autopilot will purchase Savings Plans to achieve optimal commitment coverage, and will highlight the breakdown and change of different coverage types over time. To read more about the AWS policy change for Reserved Instances, see the following blog. To read more about the new Autopilot options and configurations, see the Vantage documentation.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is being announced today?
Autopilot for AWS Savings Plans now supports purchase recommendations and automatic purchases of Compute Savings Plans. Autopilot is deprecating support for Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances due to AWS making changes to the RI policy, limiting the ability to sell reservations.
2. Who is affected by this change?
All current Vantage customers that use EC2, Lambda, and Fargate can now benefit from allowing Autopilot to automatically manage their Savings Plans commitments.
For Vantage customers who historically used Autopilot to manage EC2 Reserved Instances, they can now opt in to Autopilot for AWS Savings Plans. Vantage has proactively reached out to current Autopilot customers with more details about this change.
3. Why is this change taking place?
Moving to Compute Savings Plans allows Vantage customers to use a more flexible reservation type that is not bound to a specific region or instance type. This means that customers can, for example, upgrade to a new instance generation without needing to sell all of their existing reservations and buy a new type.
Additionally, AWS is no longer allowing resale of Reserved Instances that are discounted from the standard rate. This has a downstream effect on liquidity of any standard Reserved Instances that get listed in the marketplace. These AWS policy changes result in a suboptimal user experience for Autopilot customers who are buying and selling Reserved Instances.
4. What will happen to my existing reservations if I am a current Autopilot customer?
Although Autopilot will no longer purchase any new Reserved Instances on your behalf, you will retain your existing Reserved Instances and continue generating savings. Opting in to Autopilot for AWS Savings Plans will automatically list all of your existing RIs for sale. If Vantage sells an RI and you have automatic purchases enabled, Autopilot will backfill your coverage with a Savings Plan.
5. If I am an existing Autopilot customer and decide to keep my existing Reserved Instances that Autopilot purchased on my behalf, will Vantage still charge me?
Yes, if you elect to keep your existing Reserved Instances, Vantage will continue to charge you at the same rate based on a percentage of the savings from the RI purchases.
6. What happens if I am overcommitted?
Autopilot looks at historical compute (e.g., EC2) usage (up to 3 months) to understand your average compute usage. This is intended to help find a relatively steady-state compute footprint to base the coverage percentage on, avoiding accidentally purchasing too much coverage because of a temporary spike in compute usage.
Autopilot also purchases Savings Plans in increments that are eligible for AWS’s 7-day return policy threshold, so if there’s a mistake or a change in your plans, we can request a return of the unneeded Savings Plans.
7. How is Autopilot determining commitment percentage?
Autopilot allows customers to set a lookback period of either 7, 30, or 60 days, which will generate different effective discounts based on actual usage during that period. Customers can configure the lookback period that most accurately captures their compute usage to ensure the correct coverage level is purchased.
8. How do I configure the type of Compute Savings Plan for Autopilot to manage?
On the Autopilot page, you will see a graph of all of your remaining uncovered compute spend. Customers can configure their desired term, purchase plan, and lookback period. Based on these inputs, Autopilot will display a recommended Compute Savings Plan to purchase to cover the remaining spend. As Autopilot adjusts the commitment level, you will see a graph displaying your On-Demand, Savings Plans, and (if applicable) Reserved Instance mix of usage.
9. How does Autopilot billing work?
Autopilot will bill 5% of savings realized. Savings realized are generated by any commitment Autopilot has purchased on your behalf. If a category is overcommitted, Autopilot will take this overage into consideration and subtract it from the savings realized.
10. Can I configure Autopilot to purchase 3-year commitments?
Yes, Autopilot can be configured to purchase 3-year commitments.
11. Are there plans to support other services that have Reserved Instances?
Yes, in addition to support for Compute Savings Plans that is launching today, Vantage plans to support EC2 Savings Plans, SageMaker Machine Learning Savings Plans. Autopilot still provides purchase recommendations for Reserved Instances for RDS, ElastiCache, OpenSearch, and Redshift.
12. Are other cloud providers, outside of AWS, supported?
At the time, only AWS is supported; however, there are plans to expand into GCP and Azure.
13. Can non-discounted Reserved Instances still be sold on the marketplace?
Yes, these reservations can still be listed. We have seen a shift in liquidity and while instances are still selling, the time it takes to sell is longer.
15. Will Vantage consider adding support for convertible Reserved Instances?
This is not something we are currently considering, but if you are interested in this service, we would like to speak to you. You can reach out to support@vantage.sh to discuss further.
16. Will AWS cancel reservations for my account?
There is an opportunity to work with your AWS account manager to transition any Reserved Instances over to Savings Plans. We can help advise on the right next steps in this process. Please reach out to your Customer Success Manager with Vantage or to support@vantage.sh with any questions.
17. What types of commitments is Autopilot buying?
Autopilot will purchase commitments based on the settings configured for your account. You’ll configure these settings during the initial onboarding, and you can adjust them at any time on the Autopilot Configuration page.
