Botmetric Smart Reserved Instance Management for AWS (Powered by AIOps)
AWS users using more than 75% RIs in AWS realize the best savings, reveals an internal customer survey by Botmetric. One of the most expensive mistakes that AWS customers make is not using Reserved Instances (RIs) aptly. Just reserving instances does not reap optimum cost savings. A well maneuvered AWS Reserved Instance management plays a major role in reducing the overall cloud spend. But it takes a lot of effort and time when done manually. Don’t worry. Botmetric has your back with its AWS RI Planner.
With much delight, I’d like to introduce Botmetric Smart RI. Using Algorithmic IT Ops (AIOps), it analyzes, modifies, and monitors RIs automatically without you logging into AWS console, thus saving you time and effort that goes in manually modifying the RIs. It does all the heavy-lifting for you using automation so that you save cost optimally, which would have been impossible if done manually.
Simply put, by configuring this app on Botmetric, you can reduce the effort involved in modifying unused RIs, automate modification of RIs as soon as the unused RIs are found (that occur multiple times a day), and above all save cost that could have been wasted due to unnecessary on-demand usage, along with wasted RIs.
Key Objective Behind Building Botmetric Smart RI
Team Botmetric’s motto is to save your cloud cost as much as possible, and also help you govern your RIs and the cost associated with it optimally. Working day-in day-out on RIs, Botmetric team has observed that RIs go unused for two main reasons:
1. Changing Infrastructure Needs: Because, usage patterns change. At times, new instances are added, or few instances need upgradation from time to time as new modules, new features, or new projects are being launched. Sometimes, due to changing business strategy RIs go unused. This leads to wasted RIs and unnecessary on-demand usage and cost.
2. Miscommunication: Most of the times, the engineer who purchased the RI and the engineer who is launching them and monitoring them are different. In such cases, there are high chances of miscommunication between both of them. When instances are launched without the alignment with the purchased RIs, it leads to RI mismatch.
To get the discounted reserved pricing, it is pivotal that it matches the defined rules. For EC2, these rules include Availability Zone (AZ), Scope of Reservation, Platform, Instance Size, and Instance Type. Botmetric scans through your infrastructure for any on-demand instances that are matching two of the three rules required to take price discount of any unused RIs and highlights those instances.
One amazing thing about AWS RIs is you can modify AWS EC2 RIs any number of times at no cost. AWS has introduced this new flexibility in reservations by providing the support for modifying reserved instances, so that you get better savings.
On the other hand, the only solution for unused reservations (RI discount not being applied) is to: reallocate the RI by modifying the RIs to different zones, changing the scope of RIs, or selling the reservations on the marketplace at loss. If you have purchased reserved instances as the newly launched Convertible RI, then you have the ability to convert the instance types as well as platforms, but it may involve fresh cost.
Essentially, modifying RIs involves changing the factors about your reservation with no cost, unless you have new Convertible RI and you are upgrading/downgrading the reservation. In a typical day-to-day AWS reserved instance management, instances needs to be checked one by one and then change the factors accordingly. Few of you might even follow the scheduled monitoring and analysis of RI from time to time too.
It’s critical that you check and evaluate hourly data and create the right modifications. To this end, you will have to create a list of unused reservations and possible modifications. In simple words, you need to create an analysis report of RI in some form and then act upon it.
It is, however, easier said than done!
Here’s why: you need to look for all the probabilities by having the context of list of instance types you are running within a family, then figuring out if there are unused reservations, then figuring out the combination for modifications matching with running on-demand instances. To ease this, Botmetric built Smart RI.
How does Botmetric Smart RI help?
Botmetric Smart RI automatically modifies the reservation as soon as there is a modification available. It smartly manages RIs, which are aligned for discounts, by analyzing the usage, planning, helping with modifications, and monitoring them from time to time.
Essentially, Botmetric Smart RI helps reduce the effort involved in modifying the unused RIs. It automates modification of RIs that occur multiple times a day as soon as the unused RIs are found. It saves you that much amount of cost that could have been wasted due to unnecessary on-demand usage, along with wasted RIs.
To leverage these benefits, you can easily enable Smart RI by providing the permission of “ec2:ModifyReservedInstances” in the policy you attached with the cross account role created for Botmetric.
Apart from helping with AWS Reserved Instance Management, Botmetric also provides the capability to track the modified RI details from “Modify History.” You can get details like the time when the reservation was modified, the new combinations created by modification, etc.
Further, Botmetric AWS RI Planner also features other cool capabilities, which not only saves time and weeks of effort but also adds cloud intelligence that further helps you with apt RI management, evaluates your cloud utilization, and further saves RI cost.
Here they are below, if you’d like to explore them:
Make Confident & Smart RI Plans and Decisions
Using Botmetric AWS RI Planner, you can quickly identify what you should plan in regards to RI from your existing infrastructure, with key data available on one single console. Botmetric performs intelligent AIOps on your RI usage, on-demand utilization and existing reserved instances. For each AWS account, Botmetric runs various analysis for all relevant EC2 or RDS machines, and provide you with recommendations on what kind of RI purchase should be done for a specific server.
Analyze Existing Reserve Instances Portfolio
Using Botmetric AWS RI Planner, you can get a complete view of all the reservations across multiple accounts and multiple AWS regions. It also suggests whether a particular reserved instance is recommended to be renewed or not. Among the list of reservations, you can also know about the RIs that are expiring soon. Additionally, Botmetric also sends a RI expiry alert with the list of reservations expiring in the next 45 days. Furthermore, Botmetric also throws warning messages for RIs that are going to expire in the near future.
Get Recommendations for Unused RIs and Manage them Smartly
Botmetric, using machine learning (ML), keeps track of your RI utilization on a daily basis using your billing data and metadata of current infrastructure. If you have any unused RIs in your accounts, Botmetric detects them and provides recommendations on how these unused RIs of EC2/RDS can be utilized, essentially to reduce your monthly RI spend. Above all, it facilitates you govern and manage unused RIs aptly for maximum savings using Smart RI.
Export Reports to Plan RI Better
With CSV export option, you can download the reports of Plan RI recommendations, so that you can share it with your team. This will allow you to analyze what should be planned for RI purchase based on your utilization patterns and business needs.
EC2 Reserved Instance Change History
With the EC2 RI Change History, you can get a list of all the EC2 RI modifications performed on Botmetric. Apart from the details associated with each modified EC2 RI, the console also allows you to filter data by Linked Accounts, status, and action initiated, for better understanding of modified EC2 RIs.
Analyze RI Utilization Data
Using Botmetric AWS RI Planner, you can quickly analyze your entire RI portfolio and utilization from single graphical view in a matter of minutes. Botmetric recommends you to purchase RI for more machines to reduce your monthly spend, and the top RI recommendations, along with a visualization on on-demand vs. reserved hours.
Concluding Thoughts
You can access the Smart RI app and RI Planner from Cost & Governance product in the Botmetric Cloud Management Platform. If you are looking for that one AWS Reserved Instance Management that can help you save optimally, then Botmetric AWS RI Planner is the one. Do take the 14-day trial to experience it first hand. If you are already a Botmetric customer, then do try it and share your feedback below in the comment section or tweet to us @BotmetricHQ . We’d be happy to know how it’s working for you and what we can do to make it better to suit your needs.
A free copy of RI guide is up for a grab, if you’re looking to know about RIs in-depth. Hurry!
