Use this page to:
See what is worth buying - every recommendation carries the quantity or hourly rate to commit to, what it would cost, and what it would save.
Compare flexibility against discount - the same usage produces a recommendation in several groups, from the most flexible Savings Plan to the strictest Reserved Instance, so you choose the trade-off yourself.
Try a term and a payment option - the whole table recalculates for a 1-year or 3-year term and for each payment option.
Read the combined result - the three summary chips at the top report the saving, coverage and number of suggestions of the options you currently have open.
The Suggestions tab is read-only. Purchasing is done in the AWS Console.
Accessing the Suggestions tab
Open Reservation from the left-hand menu.
Select the Suggestions tab.
The page loads the recommendations for the accounts currently selected at the top of the page, for the term and payment option shown in the header.
Suggestions covers AWS accounts, because Reserved Instances and Savings Plans are AWS products. You need view permission for Reservation to open the page.
Selecting accounts (scope)
The controls at the top of the page pick the organisation and how much of it to include.
Whole Org - the page covers every account linked to the organisation and no account field is shown.
Account - choose accounts yourself; the selected ones appear as chips, and when there are more than the field can show the remaining ones are collapsed into a counter.
In Account mode a notice above the table states how many accounts the commitments are shown for and points at the top bar for widening the scope. The notice can be closed.
Choosing the term and payment option
Two selectors sit above the table and apply to every recommendation on the page:
Selector | Options |
Term | 1-year, 3-year |
Payment | No upfront, Partial upfront, All upfront |
Changing either one recalculates every row, every group total and all three summary chips.
How the payment option changes the price
The payment option does not change how much to commit to. It changes what that commitment costs you, and the more you pay in advance, the less you pay in total.
Take one Compute Savings Plan recommendation on a one-year term and switch the payment option on it. The recommended rate barely moves, from $2.033 to $2.034 to $2.036 per hour, because the usage it is sized against has not changed. Everything else does:
Payment | Monthly commitment | Upfront | You end up paying | Saving |
No upfront | the whole commitment | nothing | the most of the three | the smallest of the three |
Partial upfront | $742.41/m | $8 908.92 | $2 242.80/m | $361.23/m (13.9%) |
All upfront | $0.00/m | $17 835.36 | $2 206.55/m | $397.48/m (15.3%) |
Two things to read out of that:
The monthly cost and the upfront trade against each other. At Partial upfront the monthly commitment cost drops and an upfront amount appears beside it. At All upfront the monthly cost becomes zero and the whole commitment sits in the upfront.
The total you pay falls in the same order every time. No upfront is the most expensive way to hold a commitment, Partial upfront is cheaper, and All upfront is the cheapest. The saving moves the other way, so All upfront always produces the largest number in Est. Savings. Your On-demand cost does not move at all across the three, because the payment option changes what you buy and not what you already spend.
A longer Term works the same way: three years discounts more deeply than one, and ties you down for longer.
How suggestions are grouped
Recommendations are split into two categories, COMPUTE and DATABASE, and inside each category into groups by commitment type. Each group header carries a badge for the type, the number of suggestions in it, and the total saving those suggestions would produce.
Groups run from the most flexible to the strictest:
Type | What it commits to |
Compute SP | Spend per hour across every region and instance family. The most flexible option; its rows show All Regions. |
EC2 SP | Spend per hour inside one instance family and one region, which its rows name. |
RI Convertible | Capacity, exchangeable for another convertible reservation during the term. |
RI Standard | Capacity with fixed attributes for the whole term. The strictest option. |
Both Savings Plan groups carry the same Savings Plan badge, so the way to tell them apart is the rows inside: a Compute SP row is region-agnostic, an EC2 SP row names a family and a region.
One group per category is marked Best choice, and it is the one open when the page loads. Best choice is not simply the largest saving. It weighs flexibility and risk against the discount, so a stricter group further down the list can show a bigger number while a more flexible group is still the better recommendation.
The same usage appears in more than one group, because the same instances can be covered by a Savings Plan or by a reservation. The groups are alternatives to compare, not a list to buy in full, which is why only one group can be open per category at a time.
Choosing an option and reading the summary chips
Opening a group is how you choose it. The three chips at the top of the page describe the combination of the group currently open in COMPUTE and the group currently open in DATABASE:
Chip | What it shows |
Potential Monthly Savings | The total saving of the open groups added together. |
Potential Monthly Coverage | The coverage that combination would reach. |
Active Suggestions | How many suggestions the open groups hold between them. |
Open a different group in a category and all three recalculate, because you have swapped one side of the combination. That is how you compare plans: open the flexible group to read one, open the strict group to read the other, and compare the chips.
The suggestions table
Each row inside an open group is one recommendation.
Column | What it shows |
Type | The service the recommendation is for, with a badge stating whether it is a Savings Plan or a Reserved instance. |
Account / Region | The account the recommendation is for, labelled Org payer or Linked account. |
Specification | What the commitment would apply to: All Regions for a Compute SP, a family and region for an EC2 SP, and the instance type, region, tenancy and platform for a reservation. Database reservations also name the engine. |
QTY | How much to commit to: an hourly rate for a Savings Plan, a whole number of instances for a reservation. |
Term / Payment | The term and payment option the row was calculated for. |
Potential Coverage | The share of your usage this commitment would cover, above the share covered today. |
Potential Utilization | The share of the committed spend your usage would actually consume. |
On-demand to Committed | What that usage costs you now, and what it would cost with the commitment in place. |
Commitment cost | The monthly cost of the commitment, with the upfront amount below it. |
Est. Savings | The monthly saving, with a chip showing it as a share of the on-demand cost. |
A recommendation that would save nothing is not listed, so every row has a saving above zero.
Reading the numbers
QTY is a rate or a count, never both. A Savings Plan commits spend per hour, so its QTY is an hourly rate. A reservation commits capacity, so its QTY is a whole number of instances. To compare an hourly rate against the monthly cost columns, multiply the rate by 730, the average number of hours in a month.
Coverage and utilization answer opposite questions. Potential Coverage asks how much of your usage the commitment would reach, and shows the target above today’s figure; the target is never lower, because a recommendation only adds coverage.
Potential Utilization asks how much of the commitment your usage would consume, so a low figure means paying for something you would not fully use. A healthy recommendation is high on both.
Committed carries more than the commitment. It includes the commitment itself, spread across the months of the term, plus any usage the commitment does not reach, still priced at on-demand rates. That is why a row with coverage below 100 percent shows a committed value above what the commitment alone would suggest.
Est. Savings is On-demand minus Committed. It is a monthly figure and it never credits usage the commitment would not reach. The chip beside it is that saving as a share of the on-demand cost, to one decimal place. The group header carries the combined saving of the rows inside it with its own percentage.