Control Your AWS Commitments with Reserved Instances and Savings Plans Group Sharing

Your Reserved Instances and Savings Plans are designed to give you the most optimal discount rates by prioritizing the benefits to accounts in the organizations. However, you might have faced a challenge when you’re managing AWS costs across multiple business units: your Reserved Instances and Savings Plans don’t always benefit the teams that purchased them. As a result, it requires manual chargeback work to track ROI, maintain internal accountability, and align spending with your business structure.

Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of Reserved Instances and Savings Plans (RISP) Group Sharing – a new feature that gives customers an option to have granular control over how your AWS commitments are shared across your organization.

The Challenge: When Cost Savings Don’t Align with Business Structure

Enterprise customers have been asking for this capability for years. Here’s why: imagine your marketing team purchases a three-year Reserved Instance to support their campaign infrastructure, but because AWS’s prioritizes discounts to accounts that receive the best discounts, that commitment ends up benefiting your development team’s workloads instead. The marketing team still pays for the commitment, but they need to perform chargebacks to re-allocate benefits to demonstrate the ROI to their stakeholders.

Despite receiving the best discount at the organization level, this approach creates several pain points:

• Internal accountability challenges: Teams can’t track the direct benefits of their commitment purchases
• Budget allocation complexity: Public sector organizations and educational institutions with grant-specific funding need to ensure benefits stay within approved projects
• Regulatory compliance issues: Multinational companies face geographical or legal constraints on how costs can be allocated
• Manual workarounds: Organizations resort to complex third-party tools and manual processes to synthetically allocate costs after the fact

Introducing RISP Group Sharing: Commitment Control That Matches Your Business

RISP Group Sharing solves these challenges by allowing you to define how Reserved Instances and Savings Plans are shared across specific groups of accounts within your AWS organization. Instead of the optimizing for most discounts at the organization-wide, you can choose to now create groups that reflect your actual business structure – whether that’s business units, projects, geographical regions, or any other logical grouping that makes sense for your organization.

The feature offers two flexible sharing options:

Prioritized Group Sharing: Your commitments are applied to accounts within your defined groups first, then shared with the rest of your organization if there’s unused capacity. This ensures your intended beneficiaries get priority while still maximizing overall utilization.

Restricted Group Sharing: Your commitments stay exclusively within your defined groups, providing complete isolation for scenarios where strict boundaries are required.

Key Benefits: Better Control, Better Accountability

With RISP Group Sharing, you gain several important capabilities:

Alignment with Business Structure: Create groups using AWS Cost Categories that mirror your organizational hierarchy. Each AWS account belongs to only one group, eliminating overlap and confusion.

Enhanced Internal Cost Management: Teams that purchase commitments can now ensure those investments directly benefit their workloads first, making it easier to demonstrate ROI and maintain budget accountability.

Regulatory and Compliance Support: Meet geographical, legal, or funding requirements by keeping commitment benefits within appropriate boundaries – crucial for multinational corporations, government agencies, and educational institutions.

Integrated AWS Experience: The feature seamlessly integrates with your existing AWS cost management tools, including Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, and Cost and Usage Reports. You can even preview the bill impact using the AWS Pricing Calculator before enabling group sharing.

Real-World Use Cases: Who Benefits Most

This feature is particularly valuable for several types of organizations:

Large Enterprises with Multiple Business Units: Each division can maintain separate P&Ls while still benefiting from economies of scale in commitment purchasing.

Public Sector Organizations: Government agencies can ensure that commitments purchased with specific appropriations benefit only the intended programs and projects.

Educational Institutions: Universities can direct commitment benefits to specific research grants or academic departments, maintaining proper fund accounting.

Multinational Companies: Organizations can respect geographical boundaries and local regulations while managing commitments across regions.

How It Works: Simple Setup, Powerful Control

Getting started with RISP Group Sharing is straightforward:

1. Create Cost Categories: Use the AWS Billing Console to define Cost Categories that represent your business groups. The intuitive interface makes it easy to set up rules that automatically categorize your accounts.
2. Configure Sharing Preferences: Choose between Prioritized or Restricted Group Sharing based on your organizational needs.
3. Preview Impact: Use the integrated Pricing Calculator to estimate how the new sharing preferences will affect your bill before making any changes.
4. Monitor: Track group-level commitment utilization through Cost Explorer

The feature uses Cost Categories as the grouping mechanism, providing flexibility for both current account-based grouping and future non-account-based use cases. If you’re currently using our beta version with Account Tags, don’t worry – we’ll provide seamless migration support to help you transition to the new Cost Categories approach.

Getting Started

RISP Group Sharing is available now in the AWS Billing Preferences Console for all AWS Organizations in the IAD region. To begin using this feature:

1. Navigate to the Billing Preferences page in your AWS Billing Console
2. Look for the “Reserved Instances and Savings Plans discount sharing” section
3. Follow the guided setup to create your first Cost Category and configure sharing preferences

For detailed implementation guidance, visit our documentation or explore the feature directly in your AWS console.

Ready to take control of your AWS commitments? Start with RISP Group Sharing today and ensure your cost-saving investments align with your business structure.