Moneta Savings Plan Risk Checklist

This checklist evaluates factors such as usage patterns, cost efficiency, and over-commitment to savings plans, ensuring that your cloud spending aligns with actual usage. By identifying areas of risk, the checklist enables teams to optimize their savings strategies, avoid unnecessary expenses, and make more informed financial decisions, ensuring cost-effective cloud management.

Current Usage Analysis

Current EC2 and Fargate usage pattern over the last 3-6 months.

How stable has usage been? Are there any significant fluctuations?

Current mix of On-Demand, Reserved Instances, and Savings Plan usage.

Any existing RIs or Savings Plans nearing expiration?

Savings Plan Recommendation Analysis

Recommended Savings Plan commitment from the AWS calculator.

Projected savings percentage.

Recommended term length (1 or 3 years).

Is the recommendation for EC2 Instance Savings Plans, Compute Savings Plans, or a mix?

Usage Optimization Opportunities

Any ongoing or planned initiatives to optimize instance sizes?

Any plans to implement auto-scaling for any workloads?

Any opportunities to use Spot Instances for any workloads?

Considering any serverless transitions (e.g., moving to Lambda)?

Any plans to optimize our containerized workloads?

Technology Upgrades

Any plans to upgrade to newer, more efficient instance types? 

Anticipating adopting any new AWS services that could affect our compute usage?

Any planned database migrations (e.g., from self-managed to RDS)?

Any plans to implement any new caching layers that could reduce compute needs?

Product Lifecycle Management

Are any products or services nearing end-of-life?

For each product nearing EOL:

What is the timeline for decommissioning?

What compute resources will be freed up?

Are there new products launching that could offset the compute reduction from EOL products?

Architectural Changes

Any planned major architectural changes?

Anticipate moving any workloads to different AWS regions?

Any plans to implement multi-region redundancy?

Will there be a change of approach to dev/test environments?

Business Factors

What is the projected business growth rate for the Savings Plan term?

Are there any potential mergers, acquisitions, or divestitures on the horizon?

Any upcoming significant changes in the customer base or usage patterns?

Are there any seasonal factors that could affect our compute needs? 

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

Any plans to change the disaster recovery strategy? 

Any plans to increase failover capacity?

Financial Considerations

What is the comfort level with the upfront financial commitment?

How does the Savings Plan commitment align with budgeting cycles?

Have we considered the opportunity cost of committing funds to Savings Plans?

Competitive Landscape

Considering any multi-cloud strategies? 

How might changes in competitive cloud offerings affect our long-term AWS commitment? 

Historical Savings Plan Performance

Are there existing Savings Plans and if so, how well have they performed against projections?

Are there any issues with under-utilization of previous commitments?

Final Assessment

Based on all these factors, what percentage of the recommended Savings Plan commitment are we comfortable with?

Should we consider a staged approach to Savings Plan purchases?

What ongoing monitoring and adjustment processes should we implement?