One-Click Bulk Clean Up Orphaned and Unused EBS Snapshots

Hundreds of snapshots are often launched daily by an engineering team or generated automatically by AWS policies to back up data on EBS. 

Outdated backups accumulate quickly, generating unnecessary costs — yet it takes considerable manual work to continually track down and clean up each unused snapshot.

What’s New: Automated Cleanup and Archiving

We're excited to unveil Automated EBS Snapshot Cleanup, the latest addition to nOps Cloud Essentials. Now, you can automatically find and archive unused snapshots with a click, eliminating manual work and reducing costs. By moving snapshots to cold storage, you retain access while saving 75% on costs risk-free.

With nOps, you can save with the utmost confidence. Our algorithms are finely tuned to identify and analyze unused or redundant snapshots based on comprehensive criteria like age, expected frequency of use, and unreferenced data. nOps also intelligently excludes snapshots governed by existing AWS lifecycle policies, shared across accounts, or with critical features enabled. With the best, most reliable clean-up recommendations and one-click apply, engineers are freed to focus on innovation rather than maintenance.

With nOps, you can:

• See and act on all archivable snapshots in one place: Our system uses AWS APIs and various algorithms to find all outdated snapshots, making it easy to take action
• Save on storage risk-free: By archiving old snapshots to less expensive storage options, you maintain access to old data for significantly lower costs. This is particularly useful if you need to retain snapshots for compliance reasons
• Stay continually optimized: One-click bulk cleanup helps you stay continually optimized for a fraction of the engineering time and effort

Review snapshots to archive in the nOps dashboard displaying Volume ID, snapshot size, annualized savings, snapshot age, and unrealized data percentage

Starting today, you can access this new feature directly from your nOps dashboard.

How it Works 

EBS Snapshot Cleanup integrates with AWS's API to analyze snapshot data blocks, identifying unreferenced or outdated snapshots. 

1. nOps uses AWS APIs to pull detailed information about each snapshot's data blocks. Each snapshot consists of numerous blocks (e.g., half a MB each for a 100 GB snapshot).
2. The tool compares the data blocks between snapshots to determine uniqueness and relevance. 

3. The algorithm assesses snapshots based on several criteria:

   • Age and Frequency of Use: If a snapshot is the most recent snapshot and at least 30 days old, it is considered to be a full snapshot or an end of project snapshot. This indicates the snapshot won't be frequently used, and can generate savings by being moved to the Archive tier.
   • Unreferenced Data: Snapshots that are not the most recent snapshot and contain more than 25% unreferenced data blocks are also considered outdated (as data contained are largely redundant and already included in other more recent snapshots, or has been removed).

   • Exclusion Rules: Snapshots are excluded from automatic cleanup recommendations if they:

     • Are already governed by existing AWS lifecycle policies
     • Are shared across accounts
     • Have enabled features like Fast Snapshot Restore
     • Are already on Archive tier
4. Based on this analysis, the system recommends whether to archive snapshots. If recommendations are approved, archived snapshots are moved to cheaper storage tiers to reduce costs while retaining data access.
5. Users can review these automated recommendations in one place in the nOps dashboard and choose to act on them in bulk, optimizing storage automatically and reducing costs.

Continuous Optimization with nOps Essentials

EBS Snapshot cleanup is just the latest feature added to nOps Essentials, your toolkit for fast and easy cloud optimization. Other nOps Essentials features include:

• Resource Scheduling: Leveraging ML, nOps Essentials learns your usage patterns to recommend optimal scheduling, automatically implementing approved suggestions via certified AWS EventBridge integration
• Rightsizing: Simply plug in your CloudWatch or Datadog monitoring solution for the most accurate, reliable and data-backed rightsizing recommendations available
• One-click EBS volume migration: nOps automatically and intelligently updates EBS configurations from gp2 to gp3, offering up to 20% in cost savings and facilitating bulk storage instance updates
• One-click stop idle EC2 instances: Halt idle instances effortlessly, for immediate savings while retaining full operational flexibility with the option to reactivate instances as needed 
• One-click delete idle EBS volumes: Find and delete idle EBS volumes with the option to take a cost-effective snapshot for easy rollback

We're Here to Help

Have questions? Need help getting started? Our dedicated support team is here for you. Simply reach out to your Customer Success Manager or visit our Help Center. If you’re not sure who your CSM is, send our Support Team an email.

New to nOps?

You can get started with nOps by signing up for a free account or scheduling a demo with one of our AWS experts.

See ASG and Cluster Optimization in Real Time

Navigating the AWS console to gather comprehensive information about your resources often requires clicking through multiple pages and performing manual calculations for potentially hundreds or thousands of clusters. That’s why we wanted to make it easy to find what you need by consolidating all the essential information into one view. You no longer need to track down and investigate individual resources; everything you need is in one place, so you can instantaneously see exactly what’s going on in any EKS cluster or ASG.

What’s New

nOps is thrilled to release NEW EKS Cluster and ASG Dashboards in Compute Copilot. The new dashboards are designed to give you a clear view into the performance and optimization of your EKS clusters and Auto Scaling Groups. Now, you can visualize how Copilot is managing and optimizing your workloads in real time and easily track how much you saved, all in a simplified dashboard.

Let’s take a look at some of the new features and enhancements. 

Instance Purchase Options

Compute Copilot intelligently assesses and utilizes the best blend of Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and Spot for optimal reliability and cost. This section of the dashboard offers a clear view into how Compute Copilot is managing your resources. 

Easily view how costs break down by Spot, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, and On-Demand. Instantly verify that you’re on an optimal balance of Spot, SP, and RI at any moment or for any time period.

Workload Diversification

The key to Spot stability is diversifying instance types so you can tap into broader and more reliable capacity pools. A balanced mix across different types and zones enhances both resource utilization and system resilience.

You can verify through the Copilot Dashboard that nOps is running your workloads on a diverse distribution of Spot instance types across multiple availability zones — greatly improving your Spot reliability and ensuring your workloads remain available.

These charts quickly illustrate how diversified and high-available your architecture is, without the hassle of digging through dense AWS data.

For example, you can see two instances distributed across two zones, or two different instance types, each represented by one instance. This immediate clarity is a significant improvement over the AWS interface, which requires navigating multiple pages to piece together similar information.

See How Much You’re Saving 

View your real savings (how much you saved compared to On-Demand) achieved with Compute Copilot in a specific cluster. We also track total savings since onboarding, offering a clear view of immediate and long-term benefits. With Compute Copilot, you can easily monitor:

• Current month's savings
• Previous month's savings
• Total savings since onboarding

Price per vCPU vs Price per GB-Hour

At nOps, we understand that cloud cost optimization isn’t just about paying less — it’s about getting more compute out of every dollar. 

Comparing price per CPU hour vs. per GB hour provides crucial insight into your price efficiency. For each instance type, users can easily view the respective prices, enabling informed decisions about resource allocation, whether you’re optimizing for compute or memory.

This data is particularly valuable as it reveals trends in cost optimization over time. Even if overall spending remains consistent, a decrease in price per CPU or gigabyte hour indicates enhanced cost-effectiveness. Essentially, users are getting more compute for the same investment.

See how cost-efficient each individual instance is, filtering on instance type, time period, or availability zone to easily do a price-per-core comparison.

This capability complements modern tools like Karpenter, which have an increased ability to provision based on discrete resource requirements. By understanding pricing per GB and per core, you can leverage Karpenter's precise provisioning capabilities to make more informed decisions about resource allocation tailored to your specific workload needs—whether you’re optimizing for compute or memory. 

Visualize Your Workloads in Real Time

Watch how Compute Copilot replaces instances with more cost effective and reliable Spot options (Instance Types, Availability Zone). See how your workload breaks down by Spot versus On Demand, and AWS-provisioned versus Copilot-provisioned. 

Copilot offers detailed real-time visibility into all of your instances (whether launched by AWS or Copilot). This includes instance type, pricing model, availability zone, launch time, runtime duration, and effective savings. 

The dashboard makes it easy to check each instance’s state and its performance at any given moment. You can change your configurations with just a few clicks. 

How to Get Started

The new dashboards are located in the Action column on both the EKS and Auto Scaling Groups functionalities in Compute Copilot. This placement ensures that you can easily access detailed information without having to navigate away from your current workflows.

We're Here to Help

Have questions? Need help getting started? Our dedicated support team is here for you. Simply reach out to your Customer Success Manager or visit our Help Center. If you’re not sure who your CSM is, send our Support Team an email

New to nOps?

You can get started with nOps by signing up for a free account or scheduling a demo with one of our AWS experts.

Manage nOps NodePools and NodeClasses centrally via your preferred Infrastructure-as-Code (IAC) tools 

nOps Compute Copilot now offers enhanced capabilities to fine-tune your Karpenter configurations automatically and continuously for better performance at lower costs. Previously, managing Karpenter NodePools and NodeClasses via nOps required using our user interface. However, many users prefer to manage their Karpenter configurations via IAC tools. 

New GitOps Support For Improved Efficiency 

With GitOps support, you can now leverage Compute Copilot without managing Karpenter configurations from the nOps dashboard. Changes to NodePools and NodeClasses made externally via CLI or IaC tools (Terraform, CloudFormation…), are now automatically detected and synced to the nOps backend. This enhancement allows you to maintain all your configurations cohesively through your chosen tools, eliminating the need for separate management on the nOps dashboard.

This feature is particularly valuable for those overseeing multiple clusters, facilitating bulk changes across various configurations effortlessly. By using IaC solutions, you can scale operations and reduce manual effort, improving operational efficiency.

How it Works

GitOps support is available for nOps Compute Copilot agent versions 0.4.1 and higher. To enable GitOps support, simply add the metadata annotation ‘imported_by:nops’ in a key:value approach to any NodePools or NodeClasses you wish to import to nOps. The agent will recognize this label, automatically and continuously syncing these objects to the backend, including any future updates.

For more information on how GitOps support works, consult the documentation

How to Get Started

To start using GitOps support, navigate to the Compute Copilot dashboard and update your agents to the latest version. Then, to import a NodePool or a NodeClass to nOps, just add a  ‘imported_by:nops’  (key:value) in each resource that you’d like to import under ‘metadata.annotations’ object. 

On the very next agent sync, the resources will be imported in nOps, and you'll be leveraging the Spot improvements. You can even choose to manage your configurations using our YAML Editor in the app.

We're Here to Help

Have questions? Need help getting started? Our dedicated support team is here for you. Simply reach out to your Customer Success Manager or visit our Help Center. If you’re not sure who your CSM is, send our Support Team an email

New to nOps?

You can get started with nOps by signing up for a free account or scheduling a demo with one of our AWS experts.

Expanded Warm Pool compatibility makes it easy to optimize and save with Spot across all of your ASGs

If you’re currently using Spot to save on your ASG costs, you’re familiar with the complexity involved in choosing the best Spot instances for your workloads and ensuring commitments are fully utilized. However, while Spot Instances offer significant savings, they introduce complexity and management challenges, especially when integrating advanced ASG features like Warm Pools.

Compute Copilot makes it easy and reliable to save. It automatically and continuously tunes your ASG configurations to ensure you’re (1) on the optimal balance of Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and Spot, and (2) always on the most cost-effective and reliable option available, gracefully moving your workloads onto optimal instances to drastically reduce your rates of termination. 

And because Copilot is built on your existing AWS-native ASGs, it’s ultra-easy to onboard. Simply plug it in to effortlessly run mission-critical workloads with peace of mind that you’re always getting the best performance and stability at the lowest costs. 

New Warm Pool Support

We’re excited to unveil new Warm Pool support for Copilot for ASGs. With Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Warm Pools, users can improve the elasticity of their applications by creating a pool of pre-initialized EC2 instances that are ready to quickly serve application traffic. And now, ASGs with Warm Pools enabled are compatible with Compute Copilot, so you can benefit from Spot savings across the full range of your ASGs without having to worry about compatibility or management overhead. 

Starting today, you can onboard your Warm Pool-enabled ASGs onto Copilot directly from your Copilot for ASG dashboard.

How it Works

The above diagram provides additional information on how Copilot optimizes your ASGs.

For more information, you can also consult the documentation.

How to Get Started

To start onboarding your ASGs onto Copilot, follow these quick instructions. 

We're Here to Help

Have questions? Need help getting started? Our dedicated support team is here for you. Simply reach out to your Customer Success Manager or visit our Help Center. If you’re not sure who your CSM is, send our Support Team an email.

New to nOps?

You can get started with nOps by signing up for a free account or scheduling a demo with one of our AWS experts.

Finding and Deleting Orphaned EBS Volumes is Now a Breeze 

When EC2 instances are routinely spun up and down, orphaned EBS volumes are a common oversight that commonly results in substantial cloud waste. Unless you select the “Delete on Termination” option during instance launch, terminating the EC2 instance will only detach the EBS volume, not delete it. As a result, EBS volumes that haven’t been used in weeks or months frequently accumulate, draining resources and inflating bills.

What’s New

nOps is launching a new feature that makes it easy to find and delete orphaned AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes for significant cost savings.

Now with nOps Essentials, you can detect and delete EBS volumes in a single click — saving you from the tedious and time-consuming process of manually cleaning them up. 

Here’s how nOps makes the process better.

• Effortless EBS Volume Cleanup. nOps streamlines the process of identifying and deleting unused EBS volumes with just one click, eliminating the need for manual cleanup and saving valuable engineering time.
• Minimal risk. Before deleting a volume, nOps offers the option to take a cost-effective snapshot to ensure you have a backup in case rollback is needed, providing full peace of mind while optimizing costs.
• Intelligent savings. In some cases, such as Cold HDD (sc1) Volumes, you might not save by moving to a snapshot. nOps only offers recommendations that result in net savings. 

Clean up idle EBS volumes in the nOps Essentials dashboard

How it Works

Note: To access this feature, you must have purchased the nOps Essentials package.

1. If you’re onboarded to nOps, data will automatically be collected from your AWS API. 
2. If an EBS volume is not associated or attached with any EC2 instance for the last 10 days, it is considered orphaned.
   
   
3. If you will save by deleting the EBS volume, nOps will recommend that you do so and offer you the option to take a snapshot.
4. Review recommendations. When you accept recommendations, nOps will remove the orphaned EBS volumes.

How to Get Started

EBS Volume Cleanup is just the latest feature added to nOps Essentials, your toolkit for fast and easy cloud optimization. Get started with three free recommendations. Upgrade for unlimited EBS recommendations, as well as: 

• Resource Scheduling: Leveraging ML, nOps Essentials learns your usage patterns to recommend optimal scheduling, automatically implementing approved suggestions via certified AWS EventBridge integration
• Rightsizing: Simply plug in your CloudWatch or Datadog monitoring solution for the most accurate, reliable and data-backed rightsizing recommendations available
• One-click EBS volume migration: nOps automatically and intelligently updates EBS configurations from gp2 to gp3, offering up to 20% in cost savings and facilitating bulk storage instance updates
• One-click stop idle EC2 instances: Halt idle instances effortlessly, for immediate savings while retaining full operational flexibility with the option to reactivate instances as needed 

We're Here to Help

Have questions? Need help getting started? Our dedicated support team is here for you. Simply reach out to your Customer Success Manager or visit our Help Center. If you’re not sure who your CSM is, send our Support Team an email

New to nOps?

You can get started with nOps by signing up for a free account or scheduling a demo with one of our AWS experts.

nOps Compute Copilot, the premier solution for optimizing AWS Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) through smart Spot instance utilization, is pleased to announce enhanced Spot controls

By perpetually monitoring the Spot market and assessing your workload demands, nOps Compute Copilot dynamically reallocates workloads to the most stable and diverse instance types. This significantly reduces involuntary disruptions, making it orders of magnitude easier and more reliable to save with cost-effective Spot instances.

Today, we’re releasing some new features that help you fine-tune your Spot preferences. And there’s no need to dig into your ASG to perform any tedious configurations — Copilot unlocks all the options in a simple and easy UI.

Simplified Spot Controls and Preferences

Copilot looks at your dynamic usage and organization-wide existing Reserved Instances and Savings Plan commitments to put you on exactly the right amount of Spot for maximum stability and savings. 

To accommodate your workload preferences, you can specify how each ASG leverages On-Demand and Spot Instances. For example, you can specify a certain number of On-Demand instances.

• Minimum number of On-Demand Instances (NEW): The minimum amount of the Auto Scaling group's capacity that must be fulfilled by On-Demand Instances. This base portion is launched first as your group scales.
• Spot Percent (EXISTING): Controls the percentages of On-Demand Instances and Spot Instances for your additional capacity beyond Minimum number of On-Demand Instances. 
• Max Spot Instances (EXISTING): the maximum number of Spot instances that Copilot will launch as your ASG scales. 

Simply enter your requirements through text and draggable bars, and Copilot will apply your changes without any additional effort required on your part. 

Control Scale-in Protection right from the Copilot UI

Scale-in protection can be used to protect certain instances from unwanted terminations. If scale-in protection is enabled, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling (and Compute Copilot) will not terminate any instance in the group. However, scale-in protection is often unnecessarily or inadvertently enabled, preventing Copilot from performing Spot replacements.

Now, it’s easy to ignore unwanted scale-in protection in the Copilot UI. If desired, check the box and we’ll take care of the rest. 

Fine-tune your ASG configurations with new options for granular control

More about Copilot for ASG

You can read more about Compute Copilot for ASG for more details on how nOps automatically and continually moves your ASG workloads onto the most reliable and best priced Spot instances, balancing commitments and Spot for optimal price and stability. Or, find out how to onboard your ASGs at the nOps Help site.

AWS accounts often accumulate unused EC2 instances over time. These instances, often remnants of workload migrations, auto-scaling misconfigurations, developmental tests, or orphaned resources from discontinued projects, drive up unnecessary costs without delivering value. 

Stopping idle instances is one of the most effective cloud optimization strategies. For every dollar saved on an instance, two more dollars are saved on accompanying storage, network, and database charges.

nOps Essentials is thrilled to unveil a feature making it ultra easy to eliminate these wasteful hidden costs. Now, you can see all your idle EC2 instances in one place and stop them with a single click. And stopped instances (unlike terminated ones) can be easily reactivated if necessary, minimizing risk and ensuring you retain full operational flexibility to roll back if needed. 

How it works:

1. nOps automatically collects data from your CloudWatch. If your instance has less than 1% CPU utilization used continuously over 30 days, it’s considered idle. 

2. Our recommendations exclude:

   1. ASG and EKS Instances
   2. Instances that support ephemeral storage
3. Once you accept a recommendation, nOps will leverage EventBridge and Lambda functions to automatically stop your instance.

For instructions on how to get started, visit nOps help. 

• One-click apply. With nOps, saving time and money is just a click away. Review recommendations through a unified dashboard showing the historical data backing each recommendation, then approve to act on the recommendation.

Review recommendations and one-click apply in the nOps dashboard

• Intelligent Recommendations. At nOps, we prioritize your operational integrity. Algorithms are rigorously engineered to only generate suggestions with minimal risk of disruption. You can view detailed resource consumption data for each identified instance, giving engineers confidence beyond a shadow of a doubt to take action.

Recommendations are backed by viewable resource consumption data including CPU, Network, Memory and more.

• Continuous monitoring. nOps constantly scans your workloads for new savings opportunities, so you stay continuously optimized. 

One-click stop idle EC2 instances is just the latest feature to be added to nOps Essentials, your toolkit for fast and easy cloud optimization. With Essentials, you also get: 

• Resource Scheduling: Leveraging ML, nOps Essentials learns your usage patterns to recommend optimal scheduling, automatically implementing approved suggestions via certified AWS EventBridge integration
• Rightsizing: Simply plug in your CloudWatch or Datadog monitoring solution for the most accurate, reliable and data-backed rightsizing recommendations available
• One-click EBS volume migration: nOps automatically and intelligently updates EBS configurations from gp2 to gp3, offering up to 20% in cost savings and facilitating bulk storage instance updates

nOps is constantly releasing more features to automatically keep your cloud environment optimized, so you can focus on what matters most: building and innovating. 

For a hands-on demonstration or more information, contact your Customer Success Manager or reach out directly. 

EC2 instances not being correctly sized can quickly lead to unnecessary expenses. Rightsizing is critical to optimize costs and stability. 

However, rightsizing a single EC2 instance is one thing — everything gets much more complicated if you want to rightsize within Auto Scaling Groups. Most sources of rightsizing recommendations overlook this area — yet it is a huge portion of your compute cost.

Why is ASG rightsizing so hard to do right?

Rightsizing instances in an ASG is infinitely more complicated than rightsizing an EC2 instance. EC2 instances that are part of an ASG should be rightsized together — NOT individually as you would normally do when rightsizing. 

The dynamic nature of ASGs is such that instances come and go over time and may have different metrics distributions. Some terminated instances may have a higher or lower percentage utilization. These factors all add a huge amount of complexity to the calculations, particularly when it comes to Mixed-Instance ASGs.

To make reliable rightsizing recommendations, we need to account for (1) ALL of the instances that belonged to each ASG, both short-lived and long-lived, (2) track all of the instances’ metrics over time, and (3) group that data together to analyze their min and max resource consumption at an aggregate level.

Example of ASG metrics from the AWS console.

And if you make just one mistake and act on an unreliable recommendation, this may result in problems when the instances reappear — affecting the performance and stability of your workload.

nOps Makes ASG Rightsizing Simple and Seamless  

Tracking all of your instances, finding the right data, performing the right calculations, and accounting for all of the possible variables in a mixed-instance ASG is almost impossible to do manually.

That’s why nOps has integrated with the two industry-leading monitoring solutions, AWS CloudWatch and Datadog, for effortless rightsizing savings. We automatically analyze every EC2 instance in your environment (including shortlived ones) and pull their metadata to group them into their respective ASGs, analyzing min and max resource consumptions at an aggregate level to provide cost-saving recommendations.

Continuous coverage of resource-level insights such as memory, CPU, network bandwidth and storage are fed through nOps’s state-of-the-art ML engine for the best rightsizing recommendations available on the market. 

Rightsize with nOps for:

The most trustworthy rightsizing recommendations. Because nOps automatically collects and analyzes highly granular data, recommendations are 100% accurate and reliable — so engineers can act on them with the utmost confidence that workloads won’t be disturbed.

Up to 50% in immediate cost savings. When engineers don’t act on rightsizing recommendations, underutilized and idle resources continue to drive unnecessary AWS costs. nOps make it completely pain-free, safe and effortless for engineers to actually act on recommendations and start saving.

How it works

1. nOps integrates with your CloudWatch, CloudWatch Agent or Datadog to collect all of the metrics needed for ASG rightsizing recommendations, based on your last 10+ days of usage. Our API queries your data every 24 hours.
2. We quickly and efficiently process huge amounts of your CloudWatch data, crossed-referenced with AWS EC2 metadata and the latest AWS On-Demand pricing data to keep track of all of your ASGs (including terminated instances). These three sources are combined and fed through a Rightsizing Engine, allowing us to understand your dynamic ASGs holistically.

3. For each ASG, each of your instances is analyzed taking all relevant info into account, such as the metrics necessary for your particular operating system. For each instance in your environment, we make the following calculations:

   • Max Disk usage
   • Max Network usage
   • Max RAM utilization 
   • Max CPU utilization
     
     For each instance, our rightsizing algorithm compares maximum recorded usage against the capacity of a lower instance type, multiplied by a threshold value that accounts for potential future usage spikes. nOps takes into account the aggregate performance and utilization metrics of all instances within an ASG to make informed recommendations.
4. If all of the instances are rightsizable, the whole ASG is rightsizable. If you have several instance types, they can be analyzed and rightsized separately. 
5. These rightsizing recommendations are then pushed to nOps microservices, which are responsible for showing recommendations from the nOps platform on the UI.
   
   
   View your rightsizing savings in the nOps dashboard
6. Every 24 hours the process runs from top to bottom.

If you’re looking to consistently optimize your AWS costs, taking advantage of both Savings Plans and Spot is key — but balancing them can be complex. Not enough Spot means workload spikes result in expensive On-Demand coverage. And over-committing to Savings Plans can leave you paying for compute you don’t need. To make matters more complicated, some workloads are better suited for Spot and some are best for Savings Plans. 

nOps Compute Copilot offers proprietary ML-driven management and instance provisioning to put your workloads on the most reliable and stable compute at the best price in real time.

nOps intelligently balances your workloads between Savings Plans and Spot

AWS automatically applies Savings Plans to usage that has already occurred, prioritizing the highest discount rate. However, there are times in which you would actually prefer to push some of these workloads onto Spot (and out of the Savings Plan), so that the Savings Plan can be used for other resources that can’t be put onto Spot.

By proactively and strategically moving certain usage onto Spot, Copilot ensures that each workload is on the right type of discount to continually maximize your total savings. Copilot allows you to get discounts on:

• Harder-to-cover resources (for example, resources that can’t be put on Spot), so that you get discounts on ALL of your compute. 
• Resources outside of your connected clusters. Savings Plans apply across your organization. Copilot can drive certain usage to Spot, allowing resources even outside of your target workload to be covered by freed Savings Plans.

How it works:

While it’s very complicated to manually calculate how much of your Savings Plans to use to get a discount on all of your eligible compute usage, Copilot does it for you automatically. Let’s talk about how it works.

Compute Copilot ASG Lambda analyzes your AWS Savings Plans across your organization and your dynamic usage. Predictive ML is used to forecast your On-Demand usage and Savings Plans usage for the next hour to predict the amount of “Freeable” Compute Savings Plans.

If you have an unfulfilled Compute Savings Plans available and your ASG scales out with On-Demand instances, Compute Copilot Lambda will not move you onto Spot. 

If Copilot predicts there is some amount of Freeable Compute Savings for the next hour, it will automatically replace On-Demand with Spot when the On-Demand price is lower or equal to the predicted Freeable Compute Savings amount. As a result, it will free Savings Plans to cover some other previously uncovered On-Demand instance.

You can consult the documentation for more details on how nOps automatically and continually moves your workloads onto the most reliable and best priced Spot instances, balancing commitments and Spot for optimal price and stability.

Here at nOps we know the CUR like the back of our hand. We built a suite of enhanced features onto the CUR to help you transform millions of rows of contextless data into the who, what, when, and why of cloud spend. 

Enhanced Showback makes it easy to see where the money is. 

Easy-to-use and carefully curated filters help you to see clear trends and outliers in your financial reporting so you can allocate 100% of AWS cost to different workloads, environments, resource type, or other relevant categories.

Often, engineering teams trying to optimize for cost don’t have real-time visibility into hourly Savings Plan usage. It is very complicated to instantaneously calculate how much commitment is being consumed at any given time and the ideal amount of Spot to use — particularly across multiple AWS accounts.

The release includes new features enabling you to break down your costs by the most useful dimensions, such as:

• Hourly spend by purchase option for any of your environments. See at a glance how your AWS environment (or any slice of it) is balanced across pricing options (RI, SP, Spot…)

Hourly spend by Purchase Option

• The amount of your Savings Plans going underutilized during any given hour.

Amortized filters reveal the amount of Savings Plans you’re using (or not) each hour

• The tools (Databricks, Citrix…) provisioning compute in your environment. View hourly cloud spend by provisioner to pinpoint the products and activities driving your cloud spend. 

Break down cloud costs by tool or service

• The distribution of your compute spend across different AWS compute offerings.

Break down cloud costs by compute type

Check out the full blog for pro tips on how to use nOps to understand 100% of your AWS bill.

nOps was recently ranked #1 in G2’s cloud cost management category. Join our customers using nOps to understand your cloud costs and leverage automation with complete confidence by booking a demo today!