Identify Opportunities for Amazon RDS Cost Savings Using AWS Cost Explorer's Reserved Instance (RI) Purchase Recommendations

Starting today, you can access custom Amazon RDS RI purchase recommendations via AWS Cost Explorer, in addition to Amazon EC2 recommendations.

To generate these recommendations, Cost Explorer first analyzes your 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 RIs with a one-year term and a partial upfront payment option) 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 RDS RI Purchase Console via the link in AWS Cost Explorer.

Please note that you can also programmatically retrieve your recommendations via the AWS Cost Explorer API.

To get started using RI purchase recommendations, visit the new Accessing Reserved Instance Recommendations user guide. To learn more about RI cost management, please refer to the Reserved Instance Reporting webpage.