Show HN: Vantage Autopilot – Save on AWS EC2 Costs (vantage.sh)

We wrote up some documentation on this and I'm linked directly to the "How Does Autopilot work?" section for you: https://docs.vantage.sh/autopilot/#how-does-autopilot-work

               "ec2:PurchaseReservedInstancesOffering",
               "rds:PurchaseReservedDBInstancesOffering",
               "elasticache:PurchaseReservedCacheNodesOffering",
               "es:PurchaseReservedInstanceOffering",
               "redshift:PurchaseReservedNodeOffering",

An off by one error by vantage makes your company purchase hundreds of not needed 3 year commitments

If it misbehaves and buys too many / the wrong kind of RIs, you will be locked in to a high monthly AWS bill until you can sell the RIs on the AWS RI marketplace, which has a whole bunch of caveats: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-insta...

The honest answer is that there is a risk of being over-committed with reserved instances and savings plans regardless of whether you purchase them yourselves or rely on something like Autopilot to do it. We target RIs specifically because you can sell out of them on the AWS EC2 RI Marketplace which isn't the case with AWS Savings Plans.

Ultimately, cost savings are our business and what our entire team focuses on all day every day. Most everyone on our team has also either worked at AWS or another public cloud provider and knows this stuff inside and out.

While Autopilot looks to maximize savings, it always errs on the side of not overcommitting you. We haven't had a single incident here and have taken both technical and operational steps to ensure this doesn't happen.

It could purchase numerous RI's and then find there's no market for selling them.

> This seems like something you could build over a weekend

We look forward to seeing your "Show HN" with a competing product next Tuesday. Good luck.

If you enjoy problems like this, we're hiring engineers ;)

https://www.vantage.sh/careers/

"This seems like something you could build over a weekend"

Donno why but this comment reminds of the infamous Dropbox comment :).

the value of what Vantage is building is not by solving a technical challenge, it's by solving a marketplace/network effects problem (something that is much harder to do)

> This seems like something you could build over a weekend

I think you've succinctly illustrated why software estimation is notoriously unreliable.

Those estimating do not yet understand the problem.

> This seems like something you could build over a weekend

You're now at the risk of beclowning yourself if you don't post your own self-built alternative in 48 hrs! I'll be sure to come back and check ;)

Nope! We don't touch your infrastructure at all for this. Autopilot only is managing financial commitments on your behalf. Reserved Instances (and Savings Plans) sit alongside your infrastructure but do not touch it and there is no chance of this impacting your workloads.

Additionally, all of our IAM permissions are read-only with only the exceptions being managing the reserved instances themselves. You can view the permissions to validate this upon signing up.

Developer advocate at Vantage here. Using their committed use discount mechanism is definitely on our radar. We just rolled out Google Cloud support earlier this year https://www.vantage.sh/blog/vantage-launches-google-cloud-su...

There are a number of providers in this space. You're correct that for this specific feature, the main difference is the cost to the customer. Usage publicly states that they charge 20% of the savings found. We've heard that other providers have charged up to 30% of the savings found which seems predatory in nature.

Vantage is trying to more philosophically align with the customer and provide the lowest cost possible at 5% of the savings found. These are ultimately your savings and you should have as much of them as possible.

Lastly, this is just one feature we provide in addition to the other cost visibility features listed at https://vantage.sh/ under the "features" tab. Vantage also has cost visibility support for GCP, Fastly and other providers of Azure, Snowflake and Datadog on the way.

Developer advocate at Vantage here. Let me take your questions:

1. Do we have stats on liquidity in the RI marketplace (paraphrasing). Yes we do! We know that some instance types are more liquid than others and factor that into the Autopilot algorithm.

2. Does 50% account for risks? It does. We profile peaks and valleys in usage on a per compute class basis and always ensure that our RI coverage is optimally covering those peaks and valleys without running the risk of over-commitment. If there is a significant delta between peak and valley, we may make a lower RI commitment for that compute class to decrease risk. The specific coverage and savings rates are ultimately dependent on the usage by compute class which is different for each customer.

3. SOC2 timeline? We're expecting this before the end of the year.

4. Take into account existing RIs and SPs? Yes we do. The Autopilot dashboard will show you how much coverage you already have. And then here's a specific docs link with more details on this https://docs.vantage.sh/autopilot/#i-have-existing-aws-savin...

Sure, but you can still leverage an EDP, and use savings plans/RIS to save even more money.

I commit to 3 year flexible savings plans at about 60% of hourly peaks(change instance types) and top up to peak usage patterns - EDP is not a replacement for optimising cost per hour. The more you can pay AWS upfront, the more you'll save - (depends on your business's ability to do so)

That's interesting. Where can I find more info on this?

Ultimately we are just leveraging the primitives provided by AWS to make this happen. Reserved Instances and Savings Plans help AWS (which is why they offer a discount for them) as they're able to more effectively forecast and negotiate bulk purchases with their upstream vendors. If anything, on-demand usage is just charging a higher premium because of the ambiguity of when you may stop using it at a moment's notice.

Because for everyone that does care to fine tune these things, there are plenty of people that still oversubscribe massively and pay way more than they have to.

And this is just using all the existing billing info AWS already has.

To some extent, AWS's introduction of Savings Plan (just before 2019 re:Invent) did significantly eat into the margin available in this space. Prior to Savings Plan, Reserved Instances purchase advising was much more lucrative (IMO). Once Savings Plan was introduced, that became a pretty great low-cognitive-effort default and could be supplemented by direct RI purchases where you either needed to reserve capacity (not that common) or where you had a fairly steady workload and could buy RIs to cover that and SP to cover most of the balance.

For us, that turned this process from something that was large part black magic, spreadsheets, and guesswork into something that could be done 85+% well on half a napkin.

I don't think AWS has ever been low-margin and the pricing even looks deliberately complexified in some cases, like it was designed by some kind of quant.

Can you please email support [at] vantage [dot] sh? We'll see what could have happened here and will definitely refund. Typically this should only happen if you click "activate" on the free trial flow.

I believe Autopilot is competitive with Spot's "Eco" product.

From what we've heard, Spot by NetApp charges somewhere between 20% and 30% of the savings found. Vantage Autopilot charges 5% of the savings found.

We ultimately can't comment on their algorithms or effectiveness of Eco but the difference in these fees for what should be comparable savings found by both seems extreme. At Vantage, we try to philosophically align with the customer and pass on the highest amount of savings possible. Other providers seem to be doing the opposite.

You could also try CAST AI - savings report is free so you don't need to sign any contract to see how much you could save. For some users ie we've saved 90% - $124k/mo cloud cost. Feel free to play around https://cast.ai/

Nope - it's something created by AWS: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-marke...

Not really; if Vantage works as advertised it's basically free money and it should be multiplicative with any savings due to app changes.