Identify opportunities for cost savings using AWS Cost Explorer’s new Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance purchase recommendations

Starting today, you can access custom Reserved Instance (RI) purchase recommendations based on your Amazon EC2 usage via AWS Cost Explorer. These recommendations are calculated based on your past usage and indicate opportunities for cost savings.

Cost Explorer first analyzes your EC2 instance usage to automatically identify all of your on-demand usage that can be covered with RIs. From there, Cost Explorer generates RI purchase recommendations to optimally cover your On-Demand usage at a discounted RI rate—including automatically identifying instance family usage that can be most efficiently covered with Size-Flexible RIs. To ensure that the recommendations align with your organization’s needs, you can adjust the RI parameters (e.g., return only recommendations for partial upfront convertible RIs with a one-year term) and the historical time period of usage on which your recommendations ought to be calculated (e.g., last 60 days). Once you have identified the optimal mix of RIs to address your business needs, you can proceed directly to the Amazon EC2 RI Purchase Console via the link in Cost Explorer.

To learn more about RI purchase recommendations, go to the new Getting Reserved Instance Recommendations user guide. To learn more about RI cost management, please refer to the Reserved Instance Reporting webpage.