Committing and Saving Money on AWS With SoftwareONE

Many organizations understand the advantages of the cloud and choose Amazon Web Services as their on-demand cloud provider. Organizations no longer need to commit large investments on on-premise data centers and can instead quickly leverage AWS service to obtain high performance, reliability, and cost savings by exploiting the economies of scale that AWS provides.

AWS has various customers with different requirements, from individual people to businesses to enterprise-level organizations. Some companies are exploring to venture into the cloud without too much commitment, while others have a long-term roadmap with strongly defined requirements. In the scenarios where organizations have strongly defined long term requirements, AWS and SoftwareONE can provide immense value by long term commitment.

Reserved Instances

Businesses and Enterprises don’t necessarily require the flexibility to quickly enable and disable new computing capacity. Instead, they may require long-term, computing capacity, as they already have defined their computing requirements and would instead focus on saving. AWS provides EC2 Reserved Instances (RIs) that offer a significant discounted hourly rate compared to On-demand instances. AWS offers three types of EC2 RI types:

• Standard RIs: Provides the largest discount (Up to 72% compared to On-Demand) for the reservation on a particular type of EC2.
• Convertible RIs: Provide a discount (Up to 54% compared to On-Demand) and add the ability to change attributes of the instance as long as the change is of equal or greater value.
• Scheduled RIs: Instances that are available to launch at a particular time window you reserve. Allow the management of capacity at a discount when dealing with predictable recurring schedules.

Capacity Reservation

EC2 instances, unlike global services, run in a specific AWS region. An organization can decide on what region the instances are launched. Some organizations, however, desire control over what Availability Zone to which the instances will belong. Capacity Reservation, as its name implies, allows the reservation of the capacity to launch EC2 instances in an Availability Zone for any duration. Capacity Reservation doesn’t require long-term commitment; it can be created, used for as long as it needs to be, and then canceled. All that needs to be specified when making a Capacity Reservation is:

• Availability Zone
• Number of instances
• Instance attributes: instance type, tenancy, and platform/OS

However, it is important to understand that billing will be based on the reserved capacity, not on the instances that are running. Therefore it is important to commit to using the reserved capacity and cancel reservations if they are no longer required.

License Mobility

Many organizations and businesses that want to transition to AWS have significant resources tied to licenses from companies such as Microsoft, SAP, or Oracle. Licensing is considered a significant expense, and many companies can consider Licensing as one of the main factors that decide if they invest to transition to the cloud and to which provider. AWS provides the ability to Bring Your Own Licenses (BYOL) for organizations to avoid reinvesting in licenses.

Enterprises that operate in the AWS Cloud consume a large number of services over several years. A commitment to consumption over time allows enterprises to use an Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) to access discounts on the services. SoftwareONE, as a certified AWS Reseller, can offer its own EDP to customers to provide customers with deep discounts on large AWS service consumption.

Advantages of SoftwareONE’s EDP

While Amazon provides its own EDP programs, SoftwareONE’s EDP offers a set of advantages that will provide value to organizations:

• Discounts can range from 8-25%
• 10% discount on monthly support costs.
• Custom Marketplace Pricing
• Free Office Hours with Simple for AWS Packages
• World-class Simple for AWS billing service offering
• Commitments can be renegotiated annually
• Flexible contract lengths (1-5 years) and payment terms
• Significant discounts for upfront paymentsSoftwareONE’s EDP requires a commitment of $1MM for US and EMEA markets. However, SoftwareONE offers EDP’s for emerging markets such as LATAM that require as little as $100,000 in spend commitment.

Cloud adoption is an important and exciting step for any company that wants to adopt the latest infrastructure technologies. While at first glance the amount of services and their management can seem like a challenge, a company like SoftwareONE can help you through this journey by providing advisory, delivery, and managed services.