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AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans offer discounted rates compared to On-Demand pricing when you commit to a set amount of usage over time. However, choosing the right type and amount of purchase commitments can be challenging — particularly for organizations with fluctuating or rapidly scaling usage.
If you’re looking for a commitment management platform, sorting through the options can be complex. Solutions like ProsperOps and Zesty are designed to automatically adjust commitment purchases, while newer platforms like nOps bring a more comprehensive focus on cost optimization and maximizing your discounts.
This guide explores how nOps, ProsperOps, and Zesty stack up in the commitment management landscape, detailing each platform’s unique features, strengths, and limitations to help you make the best choice for your team.
The emergence of ProsperOps and Zesty
What is Zesty?
What is ProsperOps?
nOps: Discounts on 100% of Your AWS Compute
While ProsperOps and Zesty are effective tools for managing your commitments, commitment management is only one piece of maximizing your discounts.
Often, teams think they can cover 100% of their compute by buying Saving Plans or Reserved Instances.
But in practice, it’s typically only cost-effective to cover about half of On-Demand usage with commitments.
Why? SPs and RIs apply hourly, and operate on a “use it or lose it” basis. If you commit to $10 every hour but only consume $6 of services in a particular hour, you will lose the remaining $4. Because you can’t cover spikes with commitments, most companies are left with 40-50% of compute usage On-Demand, the highest AWS pricing tier.
That means that to get the lowest compute costs, you also need Spot. Spot Instances offer highly variable but deeply discounted (up to 90%) capacity for spikes in usage.
nOpst ensures all of your compute is always on the best balance of RIs, SPs, or Spot. It’s an all-in-one platform for visibility and continuous cost optimization:
- Managing Reserved Instances and Savings Planswith a 100% utilization guarantee — or we’ll credit you back for any unused commitment.
- Automated Spot managementwith awareness of your preexisting commitments and reliability SLAs matching On-Demand
- Fully automated cloud optimizationslike resource rightsizing, idle EC2, storage optimization, resource scheduling, etc.
- Support for your native autoscalers(Cluster Autoscaler or Karpenter) for better performance at lower costs
- Automated container rightsizingand EKS visibility down to the node or container level
nOps was recently ranked #1 with five stars in G2’s cloud cost management category, and we manage $2 billion in spend for our clients — book a demo to find out how to save 50%+ on your AWS spend.
Let’s briefly compare the features offered by Zesty, ProsperOps and nOps before diving into a more detailed analysis.
| Feature | nOps | Zesty | ProsperOps |
| Commitment Management | |||
| Recommendations for Reserved Instances & Savings Plans | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Fully automated management of RI & SP | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Commitment monitoring & visibility | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| 100% Utilization Guarantee (or Full Refund of Unused Portion) | ✔️ | ✖️ *Zesty will refund a portion of the management fee for unused commitments | ✖️ |
| Coverage of AWS, Azure and GCP | ✖️ | ✖️ | ✔️ |
| Spot Management | |||
| Intelligent Instance Selection | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✖️ |
| Real-time workload Management | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✖️ |
| Spot market ML predictive analysis for cost & stability based on $2 billion of AWS spend | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Commitment awareness | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✖️ |
| Cloud Optimization Automation | |||
| Automated Resource Rightsizing | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✖️ |
| Automatically Eliminate Idle EC2 | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Automated EBS Optimization | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✖️ |
| Automated Resource Scheduling | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Automated GP2 to GP3 | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Visibility & Cloud Management | |||
| Cost Allocation | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Automated Tagging | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Budget Management | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Reports & Dashboards | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Break down costs by any Kubernetes concept | ✔️ | ✖ | ✖️ |
| Break down costs by any finance concept | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Kubernetes Costs Unified with All Spend | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Fully Automated Container Rightsizing | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
1.Commitment Management with 100% Utilization Guarantee
nOps, Zesty, and ProsperOps all offer automated commitment management to help maximize cloud savings with minimal manual effort. However, nOps stands out as the only platform that guarantees that ensuring that every dollar spent on commitments is fully leveraged.
nOps offers a fully automated commitment management solution, so you don’t have to spend time reviewing purchasing decisions or manually managing your discounts and pricing plans. Unique on the market, we offer a 100% commitment utilization guarantee (or we’ll credit you back the full unused portion at the end of the month) so you can be absolutely confident every dollar you spend is working for you.
2.Integrated Spot & Commitment Management to Maximize Savings
Combining commitment management (Reserved Instances and Savings Plans) with Spot Instance management is essential for optimizing cloud costs. Reserved Instances and Savings Plans offer predictable discounts for steady, long-term workloads, but any unused capacity results in wasted spend. Spot Instances, on the other hand, provide highly variable but deeply discounted capacity..
When used together, Spot Instances handle spikes in usage, freeing up RIs and SPs for consistent demands, maximizing their utilization and avoiding overspend. This balanced approach maximizes overall cost efficiency by blending reliability with opportunistic savings. And it’s best when a single platform manages both, so it can dynamically allocate workloads to avoid underutilization, optimizing Spot opportunities while maximizing RI and SP usage. Centralizing these capabilities enhances visibility and ensures seamless, efficient cost management across workload types — which is extremely complex and difficult to do manually.
nOps improves Spot instance management over traditional methods by using machine learning to continuously monitor Spot market pricing and predict interruptions in advance. The result is better availability at lower costs (plus, huge time savings for engineering teams).
3.Free Visibility and Cloud Management Features
nOps Business Contexts is a free platform that makes it easy to understand and allocate 100% of your AWS costs, from your largest resources all the way down to your individual container costs.
With customizable reports budgets and dashboards; 40+ filters and views; as well as the ability to break down costs by any finance or engineering concept, nOps makes it fast and easy to understand and report on your cloud costs.
4.Cloud Optimization Automation
In an ideal world, you would rightsize your resources, optimize storage, and clean up idle resources before committing to Reserved Instances and Savings Plans.
nOps makes it easy to tackle time-consuming cost optimization tasks, with automation tools for resource rightsizing, idle EC2 and EBS cleanup, resource scheduling, one-click GP2 to GP3 migration, EBS snapshot cleanup, and more.
nOps integrates with your preferred monitoring tools (Datadog, CloudWatch, etc.) for high-resolution recommendations that can be implemented in one click.
By making it quick and easy to take action on cost optimization, nOps frees up your engineering team’s time to focus on building and innovating.
About nOps
nOps was recently ranked #1 with five stars in G2’s cloud cost management category, and we optimize $2 billion in cloud spend for our customers.
At nOps, our mission is to make it easy for engineers to optimize. Join our customers using nOps to understand your cloud costs and leverage automation with complete confidence by booking a demo today!
