Cutting cloud costs is best achieved by committing to usage in advance. AWS offers two ways to do it, and both trade flexibility for a discount:
A Reserved Instance commits to capacity with fixed attributes. It discounts the most and constrains the most. A Standard reservation keeps its attributes for the whole term; a Convertible one can be exchanged for another convertible reservation during the term, for a smaller discount.
A Savings Plan commits to an amount of spend per hour rather than to specific resources. A Compute Savings Plan applies across regions and instance families; an EC2 Instance Savings Plan applies inside one family and one region; a Database Savings Plan applies to AWS managed database services.
Both come with a term of one or three years, and a payment option that decides how much you pay in advance:
Payment option | What it means |
No upfront | Nothing is prepaid; the whole commitment is billed hourly across the term. |
Partial upfront | Part is prepaid and the rest is billed hourly. |
All upfront | Everything is prepaid, in exchange for the deepest discount. |
A longer term and a larger upfront payment both buy a bigger discount, and both reduce your room to change your mind.
How it works
The tabs follow the order of the questions a commitment raises:
Dashboard - is a commitment worth it? Splits your recent spend into the part a commitment could apply to and the part it could not, and plots what your existing commitments are saving you and how much of your usage they cover.
Suggestions - what should I buy? Lists the individual commitments Uniskai recommends, grouped from the most flexible Savings Plan to the strictest reservation, with the cost and saving of each. Opening a group chooses it, and the summary chips report the combined result.
Purchase Analyzer - how much should I commit to? Sizes a single hourly commitment across your whole usage instead of per recommendation, and reports a one-year and a three-year plan side by side so you can compare them.
Detailed - how is what I hold performing? Breaks utilization, coverage and waste down to the exact instance type, region, tenancy and platform, and separates your own commitments from those shared with you or obtained through a reseller.
Inventory - what do I already hold? Every commitment across the selected accounts in one list, with its details, pricing and state.
Reservation features covers AWS only. Dashboard have acceess to GCP account also . Reserved Instances and Savings Plans are AWS products, so Suggestions, Purchase Analyzer, Detailed and Inventory need at least one AWS account in the selected scope. The Dashboard stays available for any scope and drops the blocks that have nothing to report.
The scope controls sit at the top of the page and are shared by Suggestions, Purchase Analyzer, Detailed and Inventory: an organisation selector, a Whole Org and Account toggle, and an account multi-select. The Dashboard has its own account selector, and a scope you set there does not carry over to the other tabs.
The figures come from collected billing data, not from live queries, so the header states how old that data is and offers a refresh.
To manage account scope you should have connect at least one AWS account or AWS organization to Uniskai throught Account manager
