A

What are spot instances?

‍
As with any cloud service provider, AWS will have spare capacity available to support surges in customer demand. To offset the loss, AWS offers this excess EC2 capacity – in other words, spot instances – at a heavily discounted rate.

‍
To benefit from these spot instances, users must bid on this unused EC2 capacity in their desired region. The capacity is then allocated to the highest bidder. While it can be a great way to reduce costs by as much as 90%, it is only suitable for workloads that can tolerate interruptions and don’t require continuous availability. This is because AWS will terminate the instance after a two-minute notification in the event that it needs to reclaim the resources, or because the spot price exceeds the bid price. In other words, when other customers are willing to pay more.

What is Cloud Cost Optimization?

‍
Cloud cost optimization refers to the process of reducing and optimizing cloud spending, while ensuring optimal resource utilization and maintaining desired performance levels. It ultimately involves managing cloud costs without compromising business objectives or user experience.

What is a Master Service Agreement?

‍
A Master Service Agreement (MSA) is a contract between two parties, in this case the software provider and the buyer, outlining the terms and conditions of the agreement. It will typically cover pricing, payment terms, service levels, intellectual property rights, confidentiality, liability, termination, and dispute resolution.

‍
Unlike a service level agreement (SLA) which outlines the specific performance metrics and criteria for the delivery of a particular service, for example uptime guarantees and support response times, an MSA covers the broader terms of the business relationship.

What is cloud unit economics?

‍
By definition, cloud unit economics refers to the financial analysis and evaluation of both the costs and revenue associated with operating a cloud-based business.

‍
In other words, it’s a way of looking at how much it costs to run your business on the cloud, as well as how much it brings in.

What is zero-based budgeting?

‍
Zero-based budgeting is an accounting technique that requires all expenses to be justified and approved for each financial period, starting from zero rather than a pre-existing spend. This enables organizations to monitor and assess the necessity of each cost on a more granular level, lowering expenses and promoting fiscal responsibility.

‍
Originally conceived in the 1970s, zero-based budgeting isn’t a new idea — but in the current economic climate, accounting for every dollar is helping businesses to regain control over their outgoings. The technique can be applied to a wide range of costs, from research and development to asset management.

What are reserved instances?

‍
Reserved Instances (RIs) are a pricing and capacity reservation offering provided by AWS for their EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and RDS (Relational Database Service) services.

‍
They specifically allow users to commit to using a specific instance type in the same region for either a one or three-year term, in exchange for discounts of up to 72% – the exact discount is ultimately dependent on the commitment term, instance type, availability zone and region.

‍
There are various types of Reserved Instances available, each with different terms and levels of flexibility. Standard Reserved Instances provide the highest cost savings but are the least flexible, whereas Convertible Reserved Instances offer more flexibility by allowing you to change instance families within the same instance type.

‍
In contrast, Scheduled Reserved Instances offer a lower discount, but allow you to reserve capacity for specific time windows, such as business hours or weekends, providing cost savings for predictable workloads.