AWS loosened its cloud discount pricing restrictions, offering customers who purchase cloud discount Savings Plans a seven-day window to apply for credits and refunds, the company said Monday.
The move will provide customers who previously had no way to back out of bad provisioning decisions some welcome wiggle room, according to Forrester Senior Analyst Tracy Woo, who likened the policy to an “undo button.”
“This is about helping customers with ‘gotchas,’ where they badly mess up on a Savings Plan,” Woo said.
AWS offers several discount instruments. Savings Plans, which can reduce cloud costs by up to 72% in exchange for one- or three-year spending commitments, are the most commonly used option, according to ProsperOps.
The FinOps solution provider reviewed $1.5 billion in AWS bills over a 12-month period and found that more than one-third of the hundreds of organizations analyzed took advantage of Savings Plans. Customers made even less use of Reserved Instances discounts, according to the analysis.
The new policy should help organizations that already have a mature FinOps practice for tracking and optimizing cloud spend in place, Woo said. Some AWS customers could benefit greatly.
“For a lot of smaller companies, their cloud spend is pretty small but it's still a sizable part of their IT budget,” Woo said. “This could be a boon for them.”
The seven-day forgiveness window may be short but seasoned cloud customers should be able to correct mistakes within that time frame, according to Woo.
“If you have a mature FinOps practice in place, you really don’t need that many days,” Woo said.
