AWS Reserved Instance (RI) Resale has been banned. How do you keep maximum savings while staying flexible and risk-free?

Quick summary of AWS’s ban on RI resale

AWS prohibited the marketplace resale of Reserved Instances (RIs) acquired at a discount as of January 15, 2024. This means that the “flexible RI reseller market” has effectively lost the ability to provide flexibility and risk-free RI coverage.

According to estimates, the RI “flexibility/trading” market results in annual savings of over $1 billion in cloud costs. These savings are no longer available. Any cloud user that fails to actively address this issue, runs a significant risk of overcommitment, waste, and vendor lock-in.

The CAST AI platform offers a solution that allows for higher savings with full flexibility, zero risk, and zero vendor lock-in.

CAST AI offers a solution: automation

CAST AI achieves significant savings without lock-in by applying AI to continuously ensure efficiency at all levels of the Kubernetes cloud environment.

It’s a continuous process that involves bin packing pods into nodes, selecting the most cost-efficient instances, and scaling them up and down in line with actual application demand. CAST AI runs these processes automatically, 24/7.

Instead of covering a non-optimized environment with groups of non-flexible and typically wasteful 1- or 3-year commitments, CAST AI makes sure every K8s environment is as efficient and flexible as possible, automatically and with practically zero set-up time.

In the case of existing commitments, CAST AI will help customers make the most of their existing RIs by prioritizing the usage of reserved capacity.

With CAST AI, you can help your customers drive more savings, maintain resource type flexibility, and avoid expensive long-term commitments. I’ll soon explain how.

CAST AI features

A well-optimized cloud environment keeps the following principles balanced:

1. Availability and compliance – the cornerstones of every environment.
2. Scalability – being able to grow and meet the workload’s needs, but also to scale down when not needed.
3. Cost efficiency – instance types, amount of infra provisioned, and the leveraging of different discounting mechanisms offered by the cloud providers.
4. Continuous compliance with all of the above in an always changing environment.

With CAST AI, your customers get all of the above for your K8s environment, and the best part: it’s fully automated.

Autoscaling

CAST AI automatically scales up and down (thousands of nodes in minutes if needed) while continuously making sure to provision only the resources needed.

Bin packing

The platform bin packs pods into nodes to help your customers achieve optimal resource utilization.

Automated instance selection

CAST AI selects the most cost-efficient and performance-optimized instance types that stay compliant and are always available.

Workload rightsizing

On top of that, CAST AI will identify pods that request more resources than the workload actually needs and, if allowed, will automatically manage a feedback cycle that will continuously rightsize the pods themselves.

Spot instance automation

Lastly, if applicable for a specific workload, CAST AI can run selected workloads on spot instances with an automated fallback to on-demand.

How to achieve optimal resource utilization, that includes RIs

To make the most of RIs, only commit to what you’re guaranteed to use.

CAST AI will continuously optimize your customers’ environments and keep them available, all the while improving performance and reducing costs dramatically. All of this is fully automated, without the need to commit to the cloud provider for long-term consumption.

It takes about 5 minutes to install the CAST AI agent and get an analysis of your potential savings. Your customers also get access to K8s cost monitoring with dashboards to report on costs by cluster, workload, namespace, node, and more.

Once your customers are ready to enable automation, CAST AI offers a swift and free POC that will generate actual savings and showcase the automation and performance of the platform.

Partner with the #1 Kubernetes automation platform

CAST AI automates Kubernetes cost, performance, and security management in one platform, achieving over 60% cost savings for its users. Become a partner!