Work with recommendations

PerfectScale for Commitments analyzes your AWS compute usage daily and generates Savings Plan (SP) recommendations. Instead of one large purchase, PerfectScale builds a commitment ladder — a sequence of incremental purchases spread over time. This maximizes savings while reducing the risk of purchasing more commitment than you actually use.

Once your payer accounts are onboarded, it takes about 90 minutes for PerfectScale to generate recommendations. This page describes how to select your recommendation strategy and work with purchase plans.

Review current savings

The Commitments Recommendations tab shows your current coverage against the PerfectScale recommendations. To generate recommendations, PerfectScale analyzes the current inventory, taking into account expired SPs, queued SPs, your configured preferences, and AWS APIs to produce optimal recommendations and calculate potential savings.

• Current SP Commitment ($/hour): your total active hourly commitment across all Savings Plans.

• Recommended SP Commitment ($/hour): the target hourly commitment calculated based on your usage patterns.

• Potential Additional Savings ($/month): estimated monthly savings if you reach the recommended commitment.

The Current savings plan coverage chart shows your daily high, median, and daily low usage bands alongside your current and recommended SP commitment levels.

Hover over the chart to reveal exact values for each series at that point in time, so you can assess how much of your actual usage range the recommended commitment would cover.

Note

If your account uses Flexsave, select the Include Flexsave SPs checkbox to include DoiT Flexsave Savings Plans in the coverage chart and metrics alongside your customer-purchased Savings Plans.

Preview and apply commitment policy

The Commitment policy dropdown lets you simulate how a different risk profile would affect the recommendation.

• Conservative (Low risk): Commits only to your most consistent usage, reducing the risk of paying for unused capacity. Reaches the target commitment more gradually.

• Balanced (Recommended): Balances savings with a safety margin to absorb usage dips. Suitable for most workloads.

• Max Savings: Reaches the target commitment fastest with the highest savings potential, but carries a high risk of paying for unused capacity if your usage decreases.

Selecting a different policy puts the page into Preview Mode. The metric cards and chart update immediately to reflect the new policy.

To review the full impact and apply the change, select Review Changes. This opens the confirmation dialog.

The confirmation dialog summarizes your Target coverage, Commitment policy, and Total savings and compares your current purchase ladder against the proposed new ladder, with each step's date, term, prepayment, commitment amount, and potential savings.

Select Confirm to apply the policy change. This triggers a full recalculation of your purchase recommendations, which updates commitment amounts, terms, and purchase dates.

Understanding laddering

Laddering is a risk-mitigation strategy where commitments are purchased in smaller, staggered chunks with different start and end dates, rather than one large lump sum. This creates a "ladder" of overlapping commitments.

Several key principles of laddering commitments:

• Smaller commitments do not lock you into a massive spend if your workload decreases.
• Commitments expire gradually and avoid "renewal shock" where a large portion of your coverage drops overnight.
• Each step of the ladder is an opportunity to re-evaluate your usage and optimize the next purchase.

Before every purchase step, the system re-evaluates your current usage. If a dip is detected, it will naturally pause or reduce the size of the next purchase to prevent locking you into unneeded commitments.

Approve laddering plan

The Queued Purchases tab shows the commitment ladder that PerfectScale has generated based on your current commitment policy. A ladder visualizes each scheduled step — hover over a bar to see the cumulative commitment at that point.

The Laddering Policy Summary panel shows the parameters driving the current plan.

• Purchase Steps ($/h): the commitment amount added at each step.

• Commitment Term: 1 Year or 3 Years.

• Max Single Purchase (% of total): the ceiling on how large any single step can be.

• Prepayment Option: No Upfront spreads the full cost across monthly payments with no money due at purchase. Partial Upfront requires at least half the total cost upfront and bills the rest monthly, in exchange for a lower rate. All Upfront charges the entire amount at purchase and offers the deepest discount. For more information, see AWS Savings Plans FAQ.

• Recommended SP: the target commitment the ladder is building toward.

• Total Laddering Cost ($/h): the cumulative commitment cost once all steps are complete.

The table below the chart lists every step with its scheduled date, commitment amount, days until purchase, and current status. Select Edit Laddering Policy to adjust these parameters in the Settings tab.

When a new purchase plan is ready, it requires your explicit approval before any Savings Plans are purchased on your behalf. To approve a new plan:

1. Look for the orange dot across Queued Purchases in the sidebar — this indicates a new plan is waiting for your approval.

2. At the top of the Queued Purchases tab, select Approve Purchases to open the approval dialog.

3. Review the approval dialog, which summarizes what you are approving:

   • Recommended SP (you are approving this rate): the target hourly commitment ($/h) the ladder is building toward.
   • Current SP commitment (inventory): your existing active commitment at the time of approval.
   • Purchase Steps (may change): the number of individual purchases that will be scheduled.
   • Potential Savings (may change): estimated monthly savings once the ladder is complete.

4. Select Approve to confirm. The button label shows the Total Laddering Cost ($/h) — the cumulative commitment after all steps complete, which may be slightly higher than the Recommended SP. The status updates to green and the orange dot disappears.

Note

After approval, scheduled purchases execute automatically on their dates. You can pause at any time. When a commitment plan expires, it is automatically renewed based on your Recommended SP at that time.

Pause and resume purchases

After approving a laddering plan, you can pause execution at any time, for example, due to an upcoming workload migration, or a decommission that will reduce eligible usage. Pausing prevents new commitments from being purchased while you review the situation.

To pause, select Pause Purchases in the header of the Queued Purchases tab. In the dialog, optionally enter a note explaining the reason — the note is saved and visible in the scheduled purchases table. Select Pause to confirm. All remaining scheduled purchases are stopped immediately.

To resume, select Resume Purchases in the same header. PerfectScale continues from the next scheduled step, executing remaining purchases on their original dates.

Monitor commitments

The Commitments Inventory tab shows all Savings Plans (SP) and Reserved Instances (RI) associated with the selected payer account — both plans you purchased manually and those bought automatically by PerfectScale through the laddering process.

• Current Total Commitments: total hourly commitment ($/h) across all active plans in the account.

• Current Commitments Utilization: average utilization rate across all active Savings Plans. Higher utilization means commitments are being applied effectively to eligible usage.

• Next Commitment Expiration: the date and hourly commitment rate of the next Savings Plan to expire, with days remaining.

The Savings Plans Commitments chart shows each active Savings Plan as a stacked area over time. Each layer represents one plan, and the x-axis spans the full timeline of active commitments. This makes the ladder structure visible — you can see how individual plans overlap, when each one starts and ends, and how the total commitment level builds up as new steps are purchased.

The commitments table provides a row-by-row view of every plan. If the Include FlexSave SPs checkbox is selected, DoiT FlexSave Savings Plans are shown alongside your customer-purchased plans.

• Use the tabs at the top to switch between Active, Expired, and All commitments.

• A default filter shows only Compute Savings Plans. To display Reserved Instances, remove the filter.

• Each row shows the plan ID, status, type (Compute Savings Plan or Reserved Instance), term (1 Year or 3 Years), prepayment option, hourly commitment ($/h), month-to-date savings, utilization, purchaser, whether it was auto-purchased by PerfectScale, and its start and end dates.

Configure settings

The Settings tab gives you granular control over PerfectScale recommendations.

Recommendation Settings define the target and constraints for what PerfectScale will recommend:

• Commitment policy: how conservative the system is with commitments. Choose Conservative (Low Risk) for smaller, more frequent steps; Balanced (Recommended) for a moderate pace; or Max Savings for larger steps that reach the target faster. See Preview and apply policy.

• Maximum SP commitment ($/h): PerfectScale will not recommend commitments above this amount. Set to 0 to apply no ceiling.

• Prepayment option: the payment structure for purchased Savings Plans: No Upfront, Partial Upfront, or All Upfront. See Approve laddering plan for explanations.

• Preferred commitment period: 1 Year or 3 Years. PerfectScale uses this as the default term when generating purchase recommendations.

Automation Settings control when and how purchases are executed.

The current automation mode is Requires Approval: PerfectScale prepares each purchase and notifies you for approval before it executes. Autonomous Purchasing (coming soon) will execute purchases automatically without requiring approval.

• Purchase decision intervals: how often PerfectScale evaluates whether a new purchase step should be scheduled. Choose Weekly if your compute usage is growing or fluctuating. Choose Monthly if your usage is stable and you prefer purchase decisions to align with your billing cycle.

• Minimum commitment purchase ($/h): the minimum step size in the purchase ladder. Purchases below this threshold are skipped.

• Latest monthly purchase date: the cutoff day of the month after which no new purchases are scheduled until the following month.

In Payer accounts, you can add, remove, and configure payer accounts. See Set up PerfectScale for Commitments for more information.

To apply changes, select Save changes. This triggers a full recalculation of the recommendations and purchase ladder.