AWS Savings Plan Purchase Automation

We’re pleased to announce that CloudHealth users can now execute on CloudHealth Savings Plan recommendations and purchase AWS Compute Savings Plans directly from the CloudHealth Platform. Once you have analyzed the impact of different commitment levels and have settled on a commitment value, you can click ‘Purchase Savings Plan’ from either the details view or the summary view.

Please note that once a purchase has been submitted it will either execute immediately or be subject to approval (if approvers have been configured). Approvers can be configured under Setup > Governance > Actions. You can monitor the status of your purchase actions under Dashboards > Notifications. You can also configure whether a user has privileges to make or request a purchase by adding or removing the ‘Purchase Savings Plan’ privilege from a given role under Setup > Admin.

To enable a Compute Savings Plan purchase from CloudHealth you will need to update your AWS IAM policy with the following:

• savingsplan:CreateSavingsPlan

Learn more about updating AWS account policies and purchasing Savings Plans in these Help Center articles. 

Update to Cost Reallocation Backend Credit Handling

We’re providing users a selection criteria in the Cost Reallocation UI that allows you to exclude credits from the scope of the reallocation rule. Now you can update/create a reallocation rule and have the reallocation be based on gross costs instead of net costs (with the difference that “net” includes credits, whereas “gross” does not). This is especially useful if credits ever exceed costs in a target (i.e. either a Perspective Group, or a given account+ region+ time group). The default for all new rules will be against ‘Gross Cost’.  

There is no impact to any existing rules you have configured in the platform. If you update a rule with this new selection or add a new rule, the impact is that it would restate cost history for any customer with reallocation rules that had credits in the target. (i.e. this is a reallocation behavior change as any month with a credit (in the targets) would be excluded, hence this will restate cost history.) 

Learn more about cost reallocation in this Help Center article.