Saving up to 30% on CloudFront costs

Hi, I'm Al Harrington, President and CEO of Al Harrington's Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Man Emporium and Warehouse! Thanks to a hidden feature in AWS, we can commit to a an annual amount of CloudFront usage, and they are passing the savings on to you!

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Okay so I'm not Al, but I did recently stumble across this nice little savings feature within AWS. It's similar to the EC2 reserved instances feature, where you can commit to a certain amount of usage, for a lower cost, rather than pay-as-you-go.

Reserved instances does feel like you have to grab your crystal ball, and estimate how many instances you think you would use throughout the year - and even the type and size of those instances 😕

The good thing about the CloudFront savings bundle, as with Reserved Instances, is that we can enable it within the Consolidated Billing account, so it's not as if we'd need to figure out each account usage before deciding what to commit to.

It even has a nice little recommendation calculator, where it will look through historical usage and price up a commitment based on around 90% of your usage.

Saving 30% on CloudFront is quite a big deal if you have public facing services, with high amounts of traffic - this will easily save thousands annually, and dare I say millions for large sites. Just remember to tell your CEO before the next Christmas party so they know they have more to add to the bar tab 😀

This feature is probably one of the few times that I've found, where you could almost call it the 'Magic Wand' of cost savings! Especially if you are confident that you'll be using at least a certain amount on CloudFront. Just bare in mind that it is a 12 month commitment - so if you suddenly stop using CloudFront, you will still need to pay for what you have committed to (I daren't wonder what AWS would do if a company suddenly went bust during a commitment period ...)

You can find all the info on this feature and how to activate it on their post here:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/savings-bundle.html