Reservation Purchase Recommendation

Buying reservations on Compute instances is a popular cost savings strategy, but it can just as easily create additional waste if the reservations are not well matched to the active instances in your environment. How do you know how many to buy and which kind? We walk you through the options and provide purchase recommendations for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure Reservations to guide your purchase, minimizing risk, and maximizing your savings.

This section walks you through how to:

Define the Scope of the Resources to Include
Define the Reservation Purchase Parameters
Define the Reservation Purchase Actions to Take
Configure the General Reservation Purchase Policy Options
Customize the Reservation Purchase Policy
Actions Taken by the Reservation Purchase Policy
Notify Users on How to Use the Reservation Purchase Policy

Define the Scope of the Resources to Include

To define the scope of the resources to include:

Determine which resources to evaluate for the policy by clicking Select Accounts to specify the list of accounts to evaluate.

Define the Reservation Purchase Parameters

To define the reservation purchase parameters:

Input the following parameters to launch the Reservation Purchase Policy for each vendor.

Amazon Web Services (AWS): 

Look Back Period - Specify the number of days of past usage to analyze.
Service - Specify the AWS Service to search for Reserved Instances (RIs).
EC2 Specification - If the Service is "EC2", specify whether to look for Standard or Convertible RIs. For Services besides EC2, this parameter will be ignored.
RI Term - Specify the Term length for the RI.
Payment Option - Optionally, specify the payment option for this RI (all upfront, no upfront, etc.).
Net Savings Threshold - Specify the minimum Net Savings that should result in an RI purchase recommendation.

Microsoft Azure: 

Enrollment ID - the Microsoft Azure Enterprise Agreement (EA) enrollment ID.
Look Back Period - Specify the number of days of past usage to analyze.
Net Savings Threshold - Specify the minimum Net Savings that should result in a Reservation purchase recommendation.

Define the Reservation Purchase Actions to Take

To define the Reservation Purchase actions to take:

Perform the following action.

Configure users to be notified: Specify the list of recipients who should receive the Reserved Instance (RI) purchase plan. Add as many recipients as you like to the Email addresses of the recipients you wish to notify field. They do not need to be registered as Cloud Cost Optimization users.

Configure the General Reservation Purchase Policy Options

To configure the general Reservation Purchase Policy options:

Set the following standard policy configuration options when the Reservation Purchase Policy is applied.

Frequency for policy to run: Specify the frequency the policy will perform the checks, such as weekly, daily, hourly, or every 15 minutes.
Fully automated vs approval required: Specify at the time when applied whether the policy will take action after user approval versus automatically without user intervention. See the Skip Action Approvals documentation.

Note:This is a reporting-only policy, so the Skip Action Approvals toggle will have no effect.

Customize the Reservation Purchase Policy

To customize the Reservation Purchase Policy:

Policy designers can customize the Reservation Purchase Policy definition as they choose.

Actions Taken by the Reservation Purchase Policy

The Reservation Purchase Policy will produce a purchase plan for buying reservations that meet the conditions specified and an estimation of savings if the purchases are made. The policy does not purchase the recommendations.