Advanced Reserved Instances Automation

We predominantly use Zesty  to manage our spend in AWS , specifically around reserving instances for our compute workload. Our workload is dynamic, and it would be cumbersome and difficult for us to maintain and manage the reserved instance profiles ourselves. We leverage Zesty  to programmatically adjust our reserved instance purchases and sell off RI contracts as they are no longer needed.

Zesty reduces our monthly bill. On average, between 85% and 95% percent of our environment is covered by some form of reserved instance, and each of these agreements reduces the spend by 30% to 35% percent. This results in a material impact on the bill and allows us to allocate savings to other areas.

The turnkey aspect of Zesty is very valuable. I set it up, spend around 15 minutes granting access, and from there, it operates automatically. Zesty manages the workload, and their pricing is structured in a way that incentivizes them to save us more money.

There are different resource types that we would like to leverage and get reserved instances for, such as RDS  instances. Currently, no mechanism within Zesty allows this, but this may be due to AWS  limitations. Another point is that Zesty needs to react to any changes AWS makes, but they have been proactive in their communication regarding material impacts.

It's probably been about five years since I began using Zesty, back when they were Cloudvisor.

I have never had any issues or experienced a bug. Occasionally, I might need help understanding the UI to ensure I'm interpreting the data correctly, however, my customer care representative is always there to help. I've never experienced stability or outage issues.

I would rate scalability a ten out of ten. The necessary scaling is transparent to me, and I don't observe any issues.

The customer support has been great. There has been some turnover due to turmoil in Israel, where Zesty is headquartered. However, they transition well across account representatives. In the few instances I've needed support, they have been available despite the time zone difference.

Positive

The setup is straightforward. They walk you through the process, and it's as simple as copying and pasting into the AWS console. Once it's set up, you're done.

We see a return on investment every month.

Their pricing is brilliant. It is a percentage of what they save us by using reserved instances. If they save us $25,000, they might charge five percent of that, which is work we wouldn't do on our own. It's a no-brainer.

I advise that while it may seem like managing reserved instances is something you can do on your own unless you are extremely disciplined, you won't achieve the same consistency and regularity as Zesty would. Not using Zesty leaves money on the table.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. 

We use the solution for savings plans, reserved instances, and automation. We customize the reserved instances of savings plans depending on the account type.

What I like about Zesty is that it's basically being completely hands-off. It does what's expected of it, and you don't have to worry about cost or cost savings. You just automate that part of the cloud, and the buying and selling of all the little businesses and savings plans will be done for you.

One of the things Zesty recently launched was Windows reserved instances because they needed support until recently. One of the reasons we decided to onboard Zesty was that it started supporting Windows instances.

Zesty helped reduce our cloud cost without needing a FinOps team to constantly look at cloud costs. Managing all of that is completely automated now.

I would like to get RDS-reserved instances that I could buy and sell, but that's a limitation on AWS.

I have been working with Zesty in my current company for about three months, but I worked with it for a year in a previous company.

We haven’t faced any issues with the solution’s stability.

Zesty is a scalable solution. Around four people have access to the dashboard in our organization.

The solution’s initial setup is straightforward. To deploy the solution, you need to add an AIM role on the accounts you need to onboard. We enabled SSO on the portal. The SSO is just a question of negotiating the service and sharing the certificates and private keys with them, which was very easy. The initial setup took around five minutes.

We got around 48% cost savings with Zesty.

The solution’s pricing is reasonable.

Before choosing Zesty, we evaluated other tools like Cloudability. We tried other solutions, but Zesty turned out to be the best because of its insurance plan. If Zesty makes a mistake and over provisions the commitment, we don't pay their bill until the commitment is credited to us.

The way we're using it is completely hands-off. We just trust that they do the automation to buy the reserved instances and the same instance for us. The solution has other features like the storage explorer, which can save you money on new storage. It also has the Zesty disk, but I never use those because I never had the use case for them.

The solution's AI functionality is really easy to use and automatic. Since it's all automated, we don't see what the AI is doing. We just keep the savings at the end of the month and pay the bill. It is not difficult to maintain the solution. I would recommend the solution to other users because it is very easy to use.

The solution is easy to use and onboard, and its support team is really good.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.