Save On Clouds enables you to take control of your cloud usage and minimize the cost of running a platform on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud Platform.
At the moment Save On Clouds can help you reduce your costs by optimizing the utilization of the below resource types:
- Virtual Machines. e.g. AWS EC2 instances.
What cloud resources can be managed and how much you will save depends on the capabilities and pricing policies of the cloud provider.
Virtual Machines such as Azure VMs and AWS EC2 instances can be managed by Save On Clouds. What you may see in the cloud resources page might be slightly different between AWS and Azure (and Google Cloud Platform) and that is due to the fact each provider has its own way of managing virtual machines.
When you fetch the virtual machine instances of your AWS, Azure or GCP Account, you may see the instances that are part of an Auto Scaling Group. In that case, you cannot stop or start the instances individually.
In such a scenario you will see an icon next to the instance which indicates that the instance is managed by an ASG.
If you use Azure, you will not see the instances that are members of a scaling set.
Costs
When resources are fetched, we calculate their monthly cost too. Cost and pricing information is provided by the cloud providers. For example, we use Azure Pricing Cards to estimate the monthly cost of a Virtual Machine.
The cost that you see on the cloud resources page might be slightly different from the cost that you see on your invoices and bills. The reason is that we only care about the cost that can be reduced! After all, Save On Clouds is all about cost savings!
Example 1:
You buy a reserved instance on AWS and you pay for 3 years upfront. This instance also comes with Windows 2019 Data Center and SQL Server 2017 Standard Edition licenses.
In this example, the upfront cost cannot be reduced so it will not incur any savings when you stop your instances. Likewise, your SQL Server licensing cost may not be based on the usage time so, again, stopping your EC2 instance may not reduce the licensing cost.
The cost that you will see in the cloud resources, for this instance, will be the cost of the instance that can be reduced.
Example 2:
In GCP, each virtual machine’s cost is calculated based on the amount of CPU, ram, network usage, disk size, and so forth.
Some of these components will not be billed if you stop the virtual machine but some others, such as a disk, will still appear in your bills (as a cost!). In this case, we do not include the disk’s cost in the calculated cost.
Cost information in cloud resources is for you to estimate how much you may save and which resource is the most costly one. This information has no impact on your bills and is only for your information.
We also use this cost to calculate the projected savings and the previous savings on the reports page.
Managing Instances
You can see the location and the current state of VM instances in the location and status columns.
If an instance can be started, you will see a start button. Likewise, you will see a stop button if an instance can be stopped.
An instance cannot be started or stopped if:
- They are being created (or provisioned)
- They are being deleted (or terminated)
- They are virtual machines which are managed by Scaling Group/Sets
While stopping and starting resources manually is a way of managing their utilization, it’s best to use schedules to maximize your savings.
Please read the schedules page for more information.
