Optimizing cloud spending goes beyond the tactical cost reduction techniques mentioned in the Reduce component of the Guidance Framework. Most public cloud service providers offer compute instances at a much lower price than the standard pay-as-you-go model. Some of those with discounted offers are from a commitment of the compute instances, such as reserved instances. If one can analyze the utilization of compute instances over time, it is possible to significantly reduce the cloud build with the use of reserved instances. The other type of cost savings can be achieved by a different type of instance: spot instances. These compute instances are preemptible, meaning the compute instances might be returned to the service providers when the availability of compute instances is low. Spot instances offer a lot lower price compared to the standard pay-as-you-go model. However, the application that runs on those spot instances needs to tolerate the possible interruption when the service providers reclaim the spot instances.
The Guidance Framework recommends that organizations should look into leveraging the preemptible instances to gain significant cost benefits if application workloads can adapt to their limitations and the risk of unavailability can be mitigated. Federator.ai analyzes the cluster usage, forecasts future resource needs, and recommends the best combination of reserved, spot, and on-demand instances that can handle the cluster workload with optimized cloud cost. Users can further apply additional search criteria such as the country/region of the instances and/or specific public cloud service providers.