Drive Down Cloud Costs with the Cloudability Commitment Manager

Apptio is thrilled to announce the availability of Cloudability Commitment Manager, offering a new way to drive successful commitment programs for maximum cloud discounting. Leveraging this innovative feature, customers can, in a single view, understand the health of their entire AWS commitment portfolio, plan for upcoming contract expirations, and identify the impact of future purchases on reducing their cloud spend.

Large saving opportunities with the right insights

Commitment-based discounts (Reserved Instances and Savings Plans) are among the most effective options for reducing cloud rates and require no engineering effort to receive this financial benefit. By committing to levels of spend for specific types of cloud usage, AWS offers discounted rates (up to 72% off) compared to what is paid on-demand. Accordingly, an experienced Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) understands that an effective commitment program is based on maximizing the covered usage while avoiding unused commitments. Getting this right can dramatically improve the overall economics of running cloud. However, even the most skilled CCOE can struggle to achieve this goal consistently across enterprise-level cloud footprints. At the heart of this challenge – commitment programs, by necessity, must cover many different combinations of usage (combinations of region, OS, and instance type) across different cloud services (EC2, RDS, Redshift, etc.) that are purchased through different offerings (Reserved Instances which are bought in hours vs. Savings Plans which are bought in dollars). This complex landscape makes it very difficult to understand, at any point in time, what is your overall commitment coverage, the scale of waste, and the opportunity for additional savings.

An industry first program-level view for commitment-based discounts

The Cloudability Commitment Manager is an industry-first solution to allow users, in one view, to look backwards and forwards across all AWS usage qualifying for commitment-based discounting, summarizing historical performance and future saving opportunities. Soon, customers will also be able to include usage data from the other major cloud vendors, providing a multi-cloud view of your commitment program. By normalizing the unit of measurement to dollars, not only does the feature establish a shared context across Reserved Instances and Savings Plans, the user can immediately understand in real terms, historical success (covered usage vs unused hours) and the impact of future events (additional purchases and contracts expiring). By default, the Commitment Manager provides a summarized view across all relevant usage, but the user can choose to include or exclude cloud services depending on their needs. Controls are also provided so preferences can be set for items such as term length, payment model, and commitment type.

Your gateway to all commitment activities

The Commitment Manager is your gateway to all the essential activities that comprise a successful commitment program, being backed by industry-leading commitment planning and portfolio tools. By clicking through layers within the main chart, you can navigate to the corresponding list of purchase recommendations or explore existing commitments to give you the insights needed to move forward with confidence.

To learn more on how you can drive down cloud costs, sign up for a Cloudability free trial today!