Automated Reserved Instances
Not so ancient history
The DevOps and SRE space tended to discuss in terms of technology for the past few years. We sought out the next great tools in areas like observability, container orchestration, CI/CD, etc.
Given that this was also a period of hyper-growth, we unfortunately placed cost management in the back burner.
We now live in the “year of efficiency”. Companies everywhere have started adopting their own cost-effective approaches.
It’s not just about cost-cutting
Many companies do not get far by burning cash. Yet, this is not the only factor. Innovation is also critical for staying ahead of the competition.
This is indisputable.
Unbeknownst to most all, their relationship is much closer than you think. Many articles before this have made strong points that optimizing resources and reducing waste is essential to keep up with the pace of change, especially some big ones…
Efficiency is one of the key pillars for innovation. The extra savings will help us build better products and services by reinvesting into them or needless to say help keep our jobs when necessary.
Now we understand the reasons but how do we get there?
There are infinite answers but compute is always a big one.
Let’s talk about AWS
EC2 instances are infamous for being expensive. AWS offers the following to help cut costs:
The main downside is that these plans require a commitment period of 1-year or 3-years.
In today’s environment, you may be in the middle of scaling down your instances so purchasing these discounts do not make sense. You do not want to pay for a commitment for a machine that will cease to exist. A situation like that is called over-provisioning.
On the other hand, you don’t know when you will scale down thus paying full price for your boxes until they are switched off. This is called a coverage gap.
In short, 100% discount coverage is unachievable for environments that constantly scale.
Automated Reserved Instances
Fortunately, companies like Zesty and Usage AI helps us solve these issues. They provide the following benefits:
Automation
We no longer perform manual analysis of current inventory and purchase right amount of RIs.
Near 100% coverage
They buy/sell via Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances Marketplace behind the scenes.
Instant savings
It is more likely they can help you save today if we are running without a cost optimization team.
It’s almost a no-brainer to subscribe to these services!
The Catch
It’s not a no-brainer.
As seen in our history, we subscribed to supposedly great services without performing due diligence.
The same applies to these services. We need to assess whether they are a fit for your organization. Some questions to consider are:
Buy/Sell is not instant. Who is liable during a buyback event?
How does the mechanism work? Do they take control of our parent account to perform these actions?
What happens when the provider’s business folds?
I go through my findings and my way of analysing a provider in a future article.