Documentation and Best Practices



The Reservation Portfolio

Looking for the old RI Portfolio? Please use our API instead.

Managing RIs can be one of the more challenging aspects of running a cloud-native infrastructure. Often, companies have hundreds of individual RIs, each of which offers a different discount based on instance type, operating system, region, term and a variety of other factors. The specific discount determines the break-even utilization rate for a particular RI, making it tedious to understand even the seemingly simple question of how much money have I saved (or lost) as a result of owning a particular RI.

With the new Reservation Portfolio, we make it easy to understand and optimize your reservations. Simply select a date range and we'll show you any RIs that were active during that time. You can easily filter to reservations that were purchased in a particular account using Account toggle. If you have custom pricing calibrated in the application, you can also tease out how much you saved net of custom pricing discounts using the Basis toggle.

How much have I saved from buying RIs?

Use the Net Savings column to answer this question. We show the difference between (1) what you would have paid on-demand for the hours (or fractional hours) that you actually used and (2) what you did pay based on the reservation. Note that if this is negative, you actually lost money as a result of buying an RI.

How much more could I save with my existing RIs?

Use the Unrealized Savings column. We show how much additional savings would be available assuming 100% Utilization of a particular RI.

Where and how effectively is a particular RI being used?

Use the Details button, we show both the daily net savings as well as the units purchased and used. This is also where you can find a variety of additional details about a reservation.

Note that we also offer a toggle to "Show Lifetime" which allows you to see how well a particular RI was used over the entire purchase span. This can be especially helpful to see when infrastructure changes occurred which changed how much of an RI was being consumed.

Lastly, we link to a report so that you can dig deeper to see where an RI is being applied. By default, we'll show you RI allocation by account, but many customers find value in using a Collection/Tag (to show RI allocation by Business Unit), Instance Size (to see what instance sizes an ISF reservation was actually applied to) or Resource ID (to see the individual instances).



Frequently Asked Questions

How do I reconcile this with the Underutilized tab in RI Planner?

The RI Planner shows the Reservations (or parts thereof) that would be underutilized after performing the various buy and modify recommendations that would maximize total savings across your entire RI portfolio.

On the other hand, the Portfolio is backward looking, and shows the proportion of the committed hours for a particular RI that actually were consumed, which we call Utilization.

Because the Portfolio and the Planner are different tools that perform different operations, it's entirely possible that you might have 90% Utilization for a particular RI in the Portfolio but because of other recommendations that we make in the Planner, we would show 50% of the units in the RI as underutilized in the Planner.

What's the difference between units and counts?

Counts refers to the number of instance in a reservation, while Units refers to the normalized instance hours. This is relevant for RIs that can be applied to multiple instance sizes within a family (ISF link). This also helps you to reason about the overall size of an RI, so that a reservation of 5 instances of m4.large (Count of 5, Units of 20) doesn't appear larger than a reservation of instances of 4 m4.16xlarge (Count of 4, Units of 512).

Why does my savings decrease when I look at Adjusted cost?

Custom pricing often "shifts" the savings from an RI to custom pricing. To use a simple example, if an instance cost $1/hour and the reservation costs $0.80/hour, a fully-utilized reservation of 10 instances would provide $48 of savings per day (10 x 24 x $0.2)

If you have a custom pricing agreement that gives you 10% EC2 instances, your savings for this would effectively drop to $43.20 per day (10 x 24 x $0.18)

Why does savings/utilization change when I select a view?

The portfolio supports Account Group based views. However, when you select a view, we filter to both where a reservation is owned as well as where a reservation is applied. If your team purchases RIs within a linked account and want to see how much of the RI was consumed by your team, you can do that with a view.

If you just want to see RIs that were owned in a particular account, use the Account toggle on the main page.

Why can't I see this page when I log in?

You'll need to setup CUR.


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