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Commitment Optimizer

Commitment Optimizer helps you plan, purchase, and manage Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans across AWS, Azure, and GCP — tracking coverage, utilization, and savings in one place.

When to use it

  • You want to understand your current commitment coverage and utilization.
  • You're planning a new RI or Savings Plan purchase.
  • You have underutilized commitments generating waste.
  • You want to automate commitment renewals with governance guardrails.

Open Commitment Optimizer

Go to Optimization > Commitment Optimizer from product navigation.

Tabs

Tab What it shows
Overview Coverage, utilization, cost breakdown, expiry calendar, realized and missed savings
Inventory All active commitments with status, utilization, expiry, and savings
Recommendations Suggested buys, modifications, or disposals
Forecasting Projected coverage and cost under current vs. recommended posture
Execution Governance settings and approval-gated purchase automation

Review your commitment posture

  1. Apply provider, account, environment, service family, and region filters.
  2. On the Overview tab, check:
    • Coverage % — what percentage of eligible spend is covered by commitments
    • Utilization — are existing commitments being fully used?
    • Missed savings — cost that could have been covered by commitments but wasn't
    • Expiry timeline — commitments expiring soon need renewal decisions

Act on recommendations

  1. Open the Recommendations tab.
  2. Filter by environment, action type (buy, modify, dispose), risk, and status.
  3. Select a recommendation to review scope, term, risk, and expected savings.
  4. Approve, dismiss, or route the recommendation per your governance process.

Configure execution

In the Execution tab, configure:

Setting Options
Term 1 year, 3 years
Risk posture Conservative, Balanced, Aggressive
Renewal posture Auto-renew, Manual review
Autonomy mode Recommend only, Approval required, Auto reduce
Payment option No upfront, Partial upfront, All upfront

Start with Approval required

Use Approval required mode until your commitment strategy and coverage are validated. Full automation should only be enabled after several approval cycles confirm the recommendations align with your expectations.

Best practices

  • Resolve inventory gaps and underutilization before adding new commitments.
  • Separate production and non-production commitment strategies.
  • Set different risk postures per environment — aggressive for stable prod, conservative for dev.
  • Review expiring commitments monthly, not just at renewal time.
  • Treat missed savings as a planning metric, not a failure — use it to right-size future purchases.