The goal of Purchase Planner is to provide an optimal mix of contracts based on your business requirements. Archera provides 3 out of the box recommendations, but from there you can adjust and optimize however you like to adjust for your infrastructure and business needs.
Top Things to try
Create and save a Custom Plan from a Recommended Plan
Add some notes with questions to your plan to help track history
Share the plan with a colleague or with the Archera team for review
We are always happy to take a look. : )
Notes on Calculations and how plans are generated
Calculations on the page use the last 30 days of data for the default analysis.
For AWS it defaults to the last 30 days of Cost Explorer data unless you enable CUR in both AWS and Archera.
Custom plans can be adjusted to use less data
Default plans look for services that have 80% or more uptime, to do more granular coverage you can adjust a custom plan to use less time.
Segment Overview
Segments are bundles of infrastructure resources such as servers, databases and other infrastructure. The portion of infrastructure resources that are coverable based on the segment are shown under Service Breakdown. In the Purchase Planner, selecting a segment will give you resources that are Coverable, which means you can purchase commitment contracts to get a discounted price on these resources. Typical term lengths for these contracts are 1 or 3 years.
Purchase Plans
Once you have selected your Segment you can look at Recommended Plans. Archera analyzes your current instances and commitments to determine what infrastructure can and should be covered by which permutations of available savings vehicles.. By default the platform will generate three built-in plans: Flexibility Optimized, Balanced, and Savings Optimized. Flexibility Optimized has the least upfront spend and will contain shorter term length commitments and more Savings Plans vs Reserved Instances., if this Segment of your company is going through change and has less access to capital, Flexibility Optimized might be the way to go. Savings Optimized on the other hand has a larger upfront cost, longer term lengths, and ultimately higher Net Savings Rates. Depending on your companies access to capital might be hard to achieve, soo bridge the two you can start with our Balanced plan.
Click the Dots to edit and save a Recommended Plan as a Custom Plan.
Plan Summaries
Each plan includes a line item summary breakdown. Most items can be hovered over to get further details. The Coverage section with the orange and green bar shows the additional coverage being proposed in the plan, as well as the target coverage percentage. The Cost Preview section shows a graphical representation of the monthly breakdown of each plan. Elements in Dark Blue are native offerings from the cloud providers, Orange is up front costs (if any), and light blue includes Archera Guaranteed RIs.
The next section for Plan Totals includes an option to view the monthly, yearly, and lifetime breakdowns of each plan, as well as the raw Savings and Commitment dollar values.
Archera’s Guranteed RI’s are Archera's unique commitment offering that offers additional options beyond the native offerings from the Cloud Vendors. See here for more info.
The 1-Year and 3-Year commitment sections include breakdowns of how much each term length contracts are included in each Plan, and how much up-front spend is included (if any). For further information on any plan you can click the “view details” button, which is described below..
Adjusting a Plan or Creating your Own
You can verify contracts in the specific Plan, make adjustments and create your own Custom Plan if you want. Click on the View Details button on the plan and you can start to customize the plan.
Plan Details
The Purchase Planner groups resources together so you can review them together, by clicking on the Contracts tab in the Plan Details page you can go through these groups of resources to review.
Contract Group Details
The Contract Group Details section shows the resources in the group that the contract would be applied to. If you want to edit the Contract Group settings click Edit Reservation.
Monthly Costs
Monthly Costs shows the Total Upfront Cost as well as the Net Savings and Commitment.
Total Costs
The Total Costs Graph shows the cumulative total cost over time.
Break Even
The Break Even Graph shows the date in which the cost breaks even and the company will see returns on the savings.