If your project runs continuous workloads or utilizes common software, you can significantly reduce your costs through prepurchased commitments and group purchasing.

AWS Savings Plans

AWS offers two discounted options for long-term usage:

  1. EC2 Instance Savings Plans (IPs): These provide the highest possible discounts, but they are rigid. You must commit to a specific machine type and region.
  2. Compute Savings Plans (CPs): These offer lower discounts, but provide much more flexibility, covering a broader mix of compute services.

The FinOps toolkit will analyze your compute usage and recommend whether IPs or CPs would offer meaningful savings for your specific setup.

Strict Purchasing Rules for Savings Plans

If you decide to leverage an AWS Savings Plan, you must coordinate with the Science Cloud FinOps and CCS teams, and adhere to the following rules:

  • The plan must be paid entirely upfront.
  • Your current obligated funds must cover the entire purchase price.
  • If you need to transfer new funds to make the purchase, the associated CCS overhead must also be included in that transfer.
  • The maximum commitment length allowed is 1 year.

Once a Savings Plan is purchased, standard discounts and adjustments will apply just as they do with normal usage. The FinOps toolkit will continuously monitor your usage to ensure you are taking full advantage of the commitment you purchased.

Software as a Service (SaaS) Offerings

In addition to native cloud services, the Science Cloud offers SaaS products that can save you time and lower costs through group purchasing.

If your team utilizes these SaaS offerings, the costs are charged directly to your cloud accounts and are automatically included in all cost and balance calculations. The FinOps toolkit provides transparent breakdowns of the underlying cloud services supporting the SaaS, so you always know exactly what you are paying for.

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