Buying Reserved Instances (RIs) has to be an informed decision after thoughtful analysis of past usage patterns and future demand before long term commitment. Even though AWS itself provides metrics for evaluating the AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) RI purchases, one has to have considerable cloud infrastructure knowledge to interpret them clearly. To ease this up and taking several requests from our customers into consideration, we’ve now integrated RDS RI portfolio management module into our Botmetric platform.
The platform now provides the right data-points to help today’s cloud managers make the right purchase decisions on RDS RI and manage their reserved RDS instances portfolio with minimal effort.
Here’s How Botmetric Helps in AWS RDS RI Portfolio Management:
1) Choosing the Right Instance Model in AWS
Many times, AWS users select the wrong instance model. And the billing model will default to the on-demand pricing model if the specification of the resource to be deployed does not match any of the specification in the RI portfolio. Identifying the most frequently used instance model is the right step towards a better RDS RI management. Botmetric has integrated the new RDS RI Portfolio module just for this usage.
The new module helps today’s cloud managers to plan ahead based on usage data. It also helps easily narrow down the usage patterns to be tracked. Further, the tool provides the complete list of active and expired RDS RIs that can be aggregated based on instance type, linked accounts, AZ, etc. Additionally, the custom filter feature provides an overview of all the resources that will expire in few days. Users can select the days in progressive order as per their choice (10,20,50,100,300 so on), and also check the RDS RIs that are about to be expired and have to be re-purchased.
2) Choosing the Right Purchase Quantity of Reserved RDS Instances
Carefully analyzing the usage patterns and estimating the right quantity of the RIs is the best way forward to avoid over-purchase scenario and the under-purchase scenario. The over-purchase scenario is buying resources for longer periods than actually required or buying resources that have higher configuration than what would be actually required. The under-purchase scenario is the opposite of the over-purchase scenario. In this scenario, it might sometime cost more than over-purchase because the users might have to buy the additional resources required at higher cost either as spot-purchase rate or on-demand rate. Right sizing is possible if users are analyzing the resource utilization patterns carefully and making the right decisions on the configurations.
Botmetric provides the interactive reports with dropdown filters on key parameters for easy and quick narrowing down on the right resources and their right quantities. Users can also drill down on each RDS RI and check whether it has been over-purchased or under-purchased. By seeing the usage pattern of each resource, users can easily determine whether the specific configuration was a right purchase decision or not.
Furthermore, users can have a look at detailed option displays for individual RI such as start date, end date, hourly usage price/monthly recurring cost and fixed cost. With this feature, users can quickly compare the recurring cost against the fixed cost and decide on whether to go for a RI purchase or stick with on-demand purchase.
3) Constant Monitoring of RDS RIs
Botmetric helps AWS users to purchase and provision the RDS RI resources by providing the mechanisms for constant monitoring of usage patterns so that decisions on de-provisioning some of the un-used resources can be initiated to cut costs.
Additionally, Botmetric allows users to plan ahead by listing RIs that are about to expire in the coming future and also providing the usage information essential to decide whether to renew it or not.
Try our new RDS RI portfolio and do share your feedback at support@botmetric.com. While you explore other features, our team will be back soon with another great news to ease your cloud management challenges! Till then, tweet to us, like us on Facebook or connect with us on LinkedIn. If you have not tried Botmetric yet, sign-up for our 14-day trial.
