New Features: EC2 Spot Instances ROI and AWS Cost Optimization Reports

CloudForecast New Features TL;DR

• EC2 Spot Instances ROI Report
• AWS Cost Optimization Report aka ZeroWaste
• Single Sign On support
• New Knowledgebase

EC2 Spot Instances ROI Report

While there are tools like AWS’ Spot Instance Advisor that help’s you calculate the approximate savings over OnDemand if you were to use EC2 Spot Instances, it can be cumbersome and time consuming to calculate your actual environment’s Spot Instances cost, ROI and the OnDemand equivalent.

To help our users save time, we added a new sheet in our Monthly Financial Report (aka the CFO report), called “Overview – EC2 Spot” to report on the following metrics:

1. Total Spot Costs
2. OnDemand Equivalent
3. % of Savings

We break this down further with two other dimensions: sub-accounts and every EC2 Instance you are running Spot instances with. With our Monthly Financial Report reporting on Reserved Instances and Saving Plans cost and ROI, adding EC2 Spot Instances gives you better visibility into all the important cost saving initiatives you are undertaking and the exact ROI.

AWS Cost Optimization Report – ZeroWaste (beta)

We’re actively beta testing our new AWS cost optimization feature called ZeroWaste and we have been able to report up to 40% of potentially impacted total cost in some cases for our users! This new report provides visibility into areas of possible inefficiencies for the following:

• EC2 – Old generations and over-provisioned instances
• RDS – Over-provisioned or unused instances
• EBS Volumes – Report on old snapshots and unused / unattached EBS volumes.
• ELB / ALB – Find and report on all unused ELB / ALB
• S3 – Report on all S3 buckets without a lifecycle policy
• EMR (coming soon)

We plan on adding more policies for other AWS products as we get feedback from our users. If you are interested in getting one free optimization health check report, please email me directly to discuss further: [email protected].

If you are an existing Growth or Enterprise customer, this feature is available in the app for you today! Check out our knowledgebase for further configuration instructions: Get Started with ZeroWaste

“Why is my cost going up?” discovery feature (coming soon)

Currently, our Forecast Alerts in our Daily Cost Reports provide a basic summary of areas of cost anomalies and increases within your AWS environment. However, if you need to dig another level deeper to find the root cause of a cost increase, you’ll need to spend time investigating the root causes (example: Why did my EC2 Instance go up in cost yesterday?)

We’ll be adding a new “WHY” button to every Daily Cost Report with a Forecast Alert to help save our users time. This “Why” button will lead our users back to our app, which then report’s on the exact reasons for the cost increases.

Single Sign On Support (coming soon)

This is a popular request amongst our Growth and Enterprise customers. We will soon be able to support all popular identity providers such as Okta, gSuite, Azure and many others for your SSO needs. We would love to hear what identity provider you are using so we can make sure we support it!

New Knowledgebase

We took the time to overhaul our whole knowledgebase and moved it back to our own domain. As we continue to develop new features, this new knowledgebase will provide us flexibility to write and develop additional in-depth technical resources and documentation related to cost monitoring and optimization: New CloudForecast Knowledgebase.