Big news! We’ve just added a new tool that helps you make an effective and safe decision to move from On-Demand to Reserved Instances.

Reserved Instances are a killer feature from AWS that can save 35-55% of your bill and assure capacity utilization. Since they require a 1 - 3 contract, the challenge is trying to figure if Reserved Instances are right for you and how to execute the move.

Our Reserved Instance Decision Making Tool analyzes your AWS cloud and identifies exactly which On-Demand Instances should be moved to Reserved Instances. We go a step further and track how efficient your Reserved Instances are used and notify you in advance when they’re about to expire.

Reserved Instance Decision Making Tool

To keep ahead of competitors and give customers more value, Amazon is promoting Reserved Instances, which, compared to On-Demand Instances – the popular pay-as-you-go model that AWS is known for, offer even more cost savings and assured capacity availability. Reserved Instances require long-term commitments to Amazon with contracts ranging from one to three years. The problem is that moving to Reserved Instances is an extremely complex decision for IT and finance managers, who must weigh the tradeoffs between costs and utilization over time and between flexibility and a long-term commitment.

Newvem’s Reserved Instances Decision Making Tool helps AWS users make a “no regret” Reserved Instances purchase decision by analyzing their historic and current cloud usage (including cost, frequency, resource, and regularity) and indicating exactly which On-Demand Instances can be safely moved to Reserved Instances. The tool also tracks how efficiently Reserved Instances are used and alerts users when their one- or three-year contract is about to expire.

“Newvem’s KnowYourCloud Analytics is like Google Analytics for cloud computing,”

said Zev Laderman, Newvem’s co-founder and CEO. “It scans AWS usage patterns and lets AWS users know if they can benefit from Reserved Instances, indicates which parts of their cloud would benefit the most, and offers recommendations on how to execute the move.” He added.

To help AWS users evaluate whether Reserved Instances make sense for their business, Newvem’s KnowYourCloud Analytics application analyzes their past usage to determine:

• Baseline level of usage they will need in the next one to three years;
• Types of instances they will need to meet their business requirements; and
• Best geographic locations of those instances.

“Reserved Instances are too complex to figure out alone,” said Chemi Katz, vice president of technology operations at DoubleVerify. “Newvem’s service really simplifies the process and tells us exactly what to look for and how much we will save—all with a minimal time investment.”

By continuously tracking more than 15,000 AWS servers, Newvem has identified a significant opportunity for AWS customers to save money and to assure capacity availability with Reserved Instances. Specifically, Newvem has found that:

• On average, AWS users can achieve cost savings between 35 percent and 55 percent by moving to Reserved Instances.
• Sixty percent of AWS users do not have Reserved Instances; however, 88 percent of them would benefit from tremendous cost savings by making the right Reserved Instances decision.
• Of the 40 percent of AWS users that have Reserved Instances, 34 percent of heavy users are significantly underutilizing them, resulting in significant spend inefficiencies.

“Reserved Instances are a great way to stretch your EC2 investment and get more mileage out of your dollar, but we’ve never had time to really do a deep dive into the cost model vs. our utilization patterns to determine the optimal number of Reserved Instances to run,” said Nicholas Tang, vice president of DevOps at LiveStream. “Newvem’s Reserved Instance Decision Tool could be quite useful for us and potentially allow us to save money without cutting back on how much we use AWS.”

“This is really interesting information for us. Managing various Reserved Instance types requires a lot of guesswork, calculations, and on-going auditing. Newvem makes that much easier.” ,added Charlie Schluting, senior infrastructure engineer at Krux, Newvem’s KnowYourCloud Analytics has revealed more than $8 million in cost savings across the clouds of its more than 500 customers.

Use Newvem for free here.

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About the Author

Cameron Peron is VP Marketing and Business Development at Newvem.  Prior to this, he led the go to market strategy and execution behind several successful startups, including BIScience and Matomy Media. Contact him: [email protected]

Keywords: Amazon AWS Cloud services, Reserved Instance, EC2, Cost Efficiency, Amazon EC2 Capacity, EC2 utilization patterns, EC2 cost, IT,