ProsperOps, the leading FinOps automation platform, has officially announced general availability of Autonomous Discount Management (ADM) for RDS, ElastiCache, MemoryDB, Redshift, and OpenSearch products, expanding its platform offerings on AWS. To understand the significance of such a development, we must acknowledge that, while EC2 is often the largest line item on an AWS bill, RDS generally ranks #2. Beyond these two, other AWS data and analytics services, Redshift, OpenSearch, ElastiCache, and MemoryDB, also seem to have meaningful spend. Hence, in their pursuit of reducing costs, organizations have been turn turning to Reserved Instances (RIs), a type of commitment-based discount, to lower their cloud spend. However, managing RIs is time-consuming and risky, as it entails a process where FinOps teams must closely align RIs to resources by match key (region, instance type, platform, and size combinations). On top of that, RIs are also immutable. Hence, if usage drops, FinOps teams run the risk of wasting spend and paying for unutilized or only partially utilized RIs, or even increasing instead of decreasing their cloud costs. Fortunately enough, ProsperOps automated Reserved Instance management mechanism addresses that by helping organizations seamlessly optimize their cost savings, and at the same time, manage commitment lock-in risk without ongoing management overhead.
Talk about ProsperOps’ latest brainchild on a slightly deeper level, we begin from its promise of intelligent risk mitigation with Adaptive Laddering. This translates to how ProsperOps algorithms distribute Reserved Instance purchases over time to safely increase coverage and derisk from over-commitment. Such a maneuver would create a staggered ladder where some portion of commitment continually expires. An example for the same is that, if usage drops, ProsperOps stops purchasing RIs, thus allowing some of them to expire until commitments align with usage. Furthermore, the platform continually watches usage patterns and intelligently adapts ladder rung frequency and size. Now, when you work with the stated system for an extended period, it helps RI coverage stay consistently high, whereas an ongoing pattern of expirations creates flexibility that wouldn’t exist otherwise.
“ProsperOps saves Drift a ton of money, and my team a ton of time on reservations management, so when they offered to take over RDS reservations, it was a no brainer – better reservation coverage, more savings, and less effort!” said Matt Jackson, SRE Manager at Drift, a Salesloft company.
Next up, we must get into how the platform is well-equipped to save you significant time, effort, and resources. This it does by automating the time-consuming, error-prone process of managing RIs through concurrent optimization of hundred different Adaptive Ladders at scale. Users can also configure a handful of settings upfront, with ProsperOps taking over for the rest. Another detail worth a mention is rooted in the way ProsperOps systems’ knowhow in adapting RIs to dynamic usage patterns helps FinOps teams focus on other activities that further optimize cloud financial outcomes for their organization. Moving on, the platform in question is also capable of delivering at your disposal comprehensive automation prowess, packaged with sizeable control. You see, ProsperOps algorithms operate within established constraints via control settings. This means organizations can selectively disable match keys, establish vacate dates in anticipation of fully exiting match keys, and set coverage bounds. Markedly enough, the Adaptive Laddering algorithms adjust accordingly based on these settings.
Among other details, we must get into the fact that ProsperOps also provides a comprehensive set of dashboards that surface key metrics, including Effective Savings Rate, cost savings and RI coverage trends, incremental savings, and lifetime savings.
“The ProsperOps platform offers an efficient way to save on cloud spend. Today’s announcement brings that immense cost-saving potential to a host of additional AWS services,” said Erik Carlin, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of ProsperOps. “With these new product launches, organizations can have Reserved Instances automatically managed, achieving greater savings with less risk, all without the drudgery of traditional manual processes.”
