Reserved Instance and Savings Plan Best Practices
After Purchasing:
1. Set up Alerts
After purchasing a RI/SP it's highly recommended to set up Alerts. You can use AWS Cost Explorer's new reservation expiration alerts
capabilities to receive email alerts 60, 30, or 7 days in advance of your reservation expiration date, as well as on the date of expiration.
These notifications can be sent to up to 10 email recipients.
1. Setting up Renewal Alerts
2. Setting up Savings Plans Alerts
2. View utilization and coverage reports
After purchasing an RI/SP, you can view the utilization and coverage reports. Reports can be found in AWS Cost Explorer under the
respective savings vehicle.
• Utilization report: Informs if your RI/SP is being utilized. For example: 100% of utilization means the savings vehicle is being
fully applied
• Coverage report: Informs how much of you're on-demand usage is being covered by RI/SP. For example: 60% of usage is
covered by RI/SP. This means 40% of your usage is being charged on-demand. This is a good time to review
recommendations, new production workloads and if additional RI/SP should be utilized.
3. Set up a cadence to review costs and opportunities
Cost optimization is a continuous effort. Stay on top of cost optimization by setting up a cadence to review costs and opportunities. This
includes reviewing utilization reports, coverage reports, recommendations, new production workloads and other cost management
tools.
Cadence reviews in Cost Explorer:
1. View recommendations
You can utilize recommendations when reviewing for opportunities. Recommendations take into consideration active RI/SPs. You can
review recommendations 7 days after purchase. Ensure to select "Based on the past" x days accordingly so it reflects the most accurate
representation of your environment.
2. View highest cost services
View highest charges and check if RI/SP recommendation is available for that service. Under recommendations you will need to select
the recommendation type (EC2, RDS, SageMaker etc.)
• Enter AWS Cost Management => Cost Explorer
• Identify highest spend services:
a. Group by "Service"
b. "Unblended" costs = costs before discounts vs. "Net Unblended" = costs after discounts.
3. Identify stable usage
Identify stable usage by identifying new production workloads (running 24/7), confirming with your engineers and viewing usage via
Cost Explorer.
• Enter AWS Cost Management => Cost Explorer
• View stable usage by service:
a. Filter by "Service" example EC2
b. Then Group by "Instance Type"
