Today Vantage announces the expansion of Autopilot for all AWS services which support reserved instance purchases: RDS, ElastiCache, Redshift, and OpenSearch. Using a new section in the Autopilot dashboard, customers can see their reserved instance coverage rates per service as well as model prospective instance count purchases up and down to understand the various savings options available. This functionality is available to all customers at no additional cost and can help customers save up to 76% relative to on-demand costs.
Before, Autopilot only managed automated buying and selling of reserved instances for EC2. Vantage cost recommendations surfaced basic recommendations for what reserved instances to buy for other services but the onus was still on the customer to analyze coverage and actually perform manual calculations to understand potential savings for various reserved instance purchasing permutations. As AWS limits the selling of reserved instances to only EC2, Vantage’s automated service couldn’t be extended to programmatically assist customers.
The workflow for purchasing Redshift Reserved Instances recommended by Autopilot
Now, Autopilot has been extended to automatically surface reserved instance purchase recommendations for services beyond EC2. Customers can click into the Autopilot console and see a list of all AWS services they use that support reserved instances. Each service on the Autopilot page will provide a graphical representation of their usage broken down by reserved vs on-demand spend. Where there are opportunities for savings, Vantage will provide a recommendation that a customer can click to adjust. This allows for an approval based workflow of applying RI savings versus a system taking automatic actions like it does for EC2.
This feature is now available to all Vantage users, including users in the free tier. Vantage users can view Autopilot for other services in the Vantage console and read the Autopilot documentation.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is being launched today?
Today Vantage launches Autopilot for the remaining AWS services which support reserved instance purchases. Given there is no secondary market for reserved instances beyond EC2, this information is provided to all users to support approval-based workflows for applying savings. The heavy lifting of analyzing your workloads by service are provided for each category of RIs to ensure you can make swift purchasing decisions with confidence.
2. Who is the customer?
Any Vantage user using AWS RDS, ElastiCache, OpenSearch and Redshift. Your Autopilot dashboard will automatically populate with the appropriate services you use to support applying these savings.
3. How much does this cost?
There is no additional cost to to this service and it’s included in the base Vantage subscription.
4. What services does this support?
Amazon RDS, ElastiCache, OpenSearch and Redshift. This is the full list of services for which AWS offers reserved instances.
5. What information can I see before approving a purchase?
You will see the historical usage for the previous 60 days and the recommended purchase based on the break even for the historical period. You will also see projected savings and upfront payment amounts as well as toggle the number of instances you wish to buy.
6. Can Autopilot email me if there is additional coverage which I should approve?
No, however we plan to add this very soon.
7. Is there a minimum amount of data Vantage requires to make recommendations?
Vantage will present recommendations based off of the data available, which ultimately comes after processing and visualizing the data contained within Cost and Usage Reports.
8. What type of Reserved Instances does Autopilot recommend non-EC2 instances?
Autopilot will display all of the purchasing options which are available for the specific service. So you’ll be able to see the full set of options for 1 and 3 year terms and permutations of full upfront, partial upfront and no upfront options.
9. Can Autopilot auto-renew existing non-EC2 reserved instances?
Not at this time, but this is on the Autopilot roadmap. That being said, all customers receive automated emails for both expiring savings plans and EC2 instances from Vantage.
10. Do I need to onboard onto Autopilot for EC2 to take advantage of this functionality?
No, if you are not using the automated EC2 Autopilot engine you do not need to opt-in to the automated functionality. It is merely provided as is alongside EC2.
11. I recently made a reserved instance purchase but its not showing up on the Vantage graphs - what’s wrong?
The data from AWS can take two days to in order to be accurate. It can take that time for the reserved instance usage to be displayed.
12. Can these reserved instances purchases be refunded?
No. However if you need to have a purchase reversed you can contact AWS support.
