Launch: Compute Savings Plans now cover AWS Lambda Usage

We are excited to announce that AWS Compute Savings Plans now cover your Lambda usage!

Customers have been excited about Savings Plans since their introduction in November. The reason is that Savings Plans provide additional flexibility, while retaining the savings potential that Reserved Instances are known for. With the inclusion of AWS Lambda to Compute Savings Plans, builders no longer have to worry about whether they should run their applications on EC2, Fargate, or Lambda in order to take advantage of Compute Savings Plans savings.

Customers are leveraging serverless architectures to build a wide variety of applications, ranging from mobile back-ends, streaming analytics, and web APIs to data processing stages for machine learning. So whether you’re running serverless applications today or are just considering it, Compute Savings Plans with Lambda now make it easier than ever to realize savings.

Details: How Compute Savings Plans with Lambda works

From February 1st and onward, Lambda usage for Duration, Provisioned Concurrency, and Provisioned Concurrency Duration now applies to Compute Savings Plans and can save customers up to 17% for 1-year and 3-year commitments.

You will notice that Requests are not specifically called out above. While there is no discount offered on Requests, your spend on Requests will drawn down from your Savings Plans commitment thus helping you improve the utilization of your plan. For more on how Savings Plan discounts are applied, check out our documentation.

Viewing Compute Savings Plans in AWS Cost Management Console

Getting Started with Savings Plans in the Cost Management Console is easy.  Using the Cost Management Console, customers can track Savings Plan Coverage, Utilization, and review purchase recommendations. While some of those features are already well documented, we will focus on how this launch –and specifically Lambda Savings Plan usage—may impact Utilization and Coverage reports

1.  Understanding Savings Plan for Lambda using Utilization Reports

Savings Plans Utilization Reports allow you to measure how your usage is tracking against your Savings Plan commitments.  In other words, Utilization reports show the percentage of your Savings Plan commitment you are utilizing across all of your compute usage. While many are familiar with how Utilization Reports work and are tracking utilization rates continuously, intruding AWS Lambda to Savings Plan may affect utilization rates.  If you are currently using AWS Lambda, this launch will likely increase the utilization rate for any underutilized Compute Savings Plans.

See the table below for an example of how Utilization is calculated.

To learn more about how Savings Plans utilization is calculated, please see the Using the Utilization Report section of the Savings Plans User Guide

2.  Understanding Savings Plan for Lambda using Coverage Reports

The Savings Plan Coverage Report shows customers how much of their eligible spend is covered by Savings Plan commitments. Similar to Utilization reports, those customers who are familiar with Coverage Reports and track them regularly may notice a change in coverage metrics with this launch. With the introduction of Savings Plans for AWS Lambda, customers may notice a decrease in coverage rates beginning February 1st onward (no impact on historical coverage rates) with the addition of additional usage types that are now eligible for coverage.

To see why, let us look at another example, starting with how Coverage is calculated.

To learn more about how Savings Plans coverage is calculated, please see the Using Your Coverage Report section of the Savings Plans User Guide.

3.  Understanding key reports and filters in Cost Explorer

Getting started with your Savings Plan Coverage Report is a helpful way to view aggregate table view of all running services that are eligible for coverage by Savings Plans.  With this release, now customers can drill down specifically into AWS Lambda Savings Plan usage coverage:

Sometimes we hear from customers who want to tie out savings numbers in their Savings Plan Coverage Reports with the numbers they see in AWS Cost Explorer.  A helpful tip is to start by noting the last date Coverage was recorded. The example above starts on 1-Feb and ends on 18-Feb.

Customers can then navigate to Cost Explorer to get a more granular view within their Cost and Usage report view. You’ll notice that the savings numbers within the this report will match those in the Coverage report when you 1) use the Service filter to view Lambda usage, 2) Group by Charge Type, and 3) ensure that your date range match those of your coverage report:

Note: The spend covered by savings plans column in the Savings Plans Coverage Report provides savings at the whole dollar value but the exact value can be retrieved by downloading the CSV file.

Conclusion

Savings Plans have just gotten even more flexible with the inclusion of AWS Lambda and it is easy to get started with AWS Cost Explorer.  By logging into the AWS Cost Management console, customers can take advantage of Savings Plan recommendations to help inform Savings Plan commitments and use Coverage and Utilization reports to better understand how this launch will impact existing metrics.

Get started today by logging into the AWS Cost Management Console!