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Purchase Reserved Capacity

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Purchase reserved capacity for your Amazon DynamoDB tables in order to receive a significant discount on the hourly charges. Reserved capacity is a billing feature that enables you to obtain discounts on your provisioned DynamoDB throughput capacity in exchange for a one-time up-front payment and commitment to a certain usage level. DynamoDB reserved capacity applies to a specific AWS region and can be purchased with 1-year or 3-year terms. The cost savings when using reserved capacity over on-demand provisioned capacity are up to 76% depending on the selected commitment term. A term of one year offers a 53% discount on provisioned throughput and a term of three years offers a 76% discount. Reserved capacity is applied to the aggregate capacity of all DynamoDB tables available within a specified AWS region. The capacity units provisioned beyond your reserved capacity will be billed at standard (i.e. on-demand) rates. To save even more money using DynamoDB reserved capacity pricing model, you have to predict the read and write capacity required for your DynamoDB tables within a given region: reserve too little capacity and you will end up paying on-demand prices where you could have had a discount; reserve too much and you will pay for capacity that gets unused, as you are being charged regardless whether or not you consume the provisioned capacity. To determine how much read and write capacity you can safely reserve you need to check your DynamoDB CloudWatch metrics. The CloudWatch metrics used to determine how much of your DynamoDB provisioned throughput is consumed are ConsumedReadCapacityUnits and ConsumedWriteCapacityUnits – the number of read/write capacity units consumed over a specified time period (Units: Count).

Cost
optimisation

The reserved capacity pricing model represent a good strategy to cut down your Amazon DynamoDB costs. By reserving your DynamoDB read and write capacity units ahead of time, you can obtain significant cost savings compared to on-demand (standard) model.

Note 1: DynamoDB reserved capacity is applied to the total provisioned capacity within the AWS region in which you purchased your reserved capacity units. For example, if you purchased 10,000 read capacity units of reserved capacity, you can apply these to one table with 10,000 read capacity units, to 100 tables with 100 read capacity units or to 1000 tables with 10 read capacity units.

Note 2: You can reserve read or write capacity in quantities of up to 100,000 units. If you need to reserve more than 100,000 capacity units, you can make multiple capacity reservations. To get assistance for reserving DynamoDB capacity, you can open an AWS support case using the following parameters:


Audit

To determine if your Amazon DynamoDB tables are using the reserved capacity pricing model, perform the following actions:

Note: Verifying DynamoDB reserved read and write capacity using the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) is not currently supported.

Using AWS Console

01 Sign in to the AWS Management Console.

02 Navigate to Amazon DynamoDB console available at https://console.aws.amazon.com/dynamodbv2/.

03 In the main navigation panel, choose Reserved capacity.

04 In the Total capacity for the [region-name] Region section, check the values (numbers) available for the Standard reserved read capacity and Standard reserved write capacity attributes. If both Standard reserved read capacity and Standard reserved write capacity are set to 0 (zero), there are no read and write capacity units reserved, therefore the Amazon DynamoDB tables provisioned within the selected AWS cloud region are not using the reserved capacity pricing model offered by AWS to get a discount on the service charges.

05 Change the AWS cloud region from the navigation bar and repeat the Audit process for other regions.

Remediation / Resolution

Before you purchase reserved capacity for your Amazon DynamoDB tables, you need to determine how much read and write capacity throughput your tables consume using the **ConsumedReadCapacityUnits** and **ConsumedWriteCapacityUnits** metrics. The data recorded by these CloudWatch metrics will help you achieve a more reliable understanding of your DynamoDB usage patterns and predict the amount of units needed. To determine the right amount of read and write capacity units required by DynamoDB tables within a particular AWS cloud region and purchase the necessary reserved capacity, perform the following actions:

Note: Purchasing reserved read and write capacity units using the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) is not currently supported.

Using AWS Console

01 Sign in to the AWS Management Console.

02 Navigate to Amazon DynamoDB console available at https://console.aws.amazon.com/dynamodbv2/.

03 In the main navigation panel, under Dashboard, choose Tables.

04 Click on the name (link) of the DynamoDB table that you want to examine.

05 Select the Monitor tab to access the monitoring settings available for the selected table.

06 In the CloudWatch metrics section choose View all in CloudWatch to open the table metrics in Amazon CloudWatch.

07 Choose the Browse tab, select the appropriate AWS region, search for the ConsumedReadCapacityUnits and ConsumedWriteCapacityUnits metrics, and select the ConsumedReadCapacityUnits and ConsumedWriteCapacityUnits metrics available for your DynamoDB table.

08 Choose the Graphed metrics tab, select both ConsumedReadCapacityUnits and ConsumedWriteCapacityUnits metrics, and configure the following settings:

  1. On the Graphed metrics panel, select Sum from the Statistic dropdown list. The Sum statistic represents the total read/write capacity units consumed by the selected DynamoDB table.
  2. On the Graphed metrics panel, select 30 Days from the Period dropdown list in order to return the usage data recorded over a longer period of time. 30 days is the maximum time period available for these metrics.
  3. Set the metric graph type to Number, in the page top menu, to show the data in numbers.
  4. Check the usage data (numbers) returned for the ConsumedReadCapacityUnits and ConsumedWriteCapacityUnits metrics in the graph section, to determine how much read and write capacity units have been consumed by the DynamoDB tables provisioned in the selected AWS region in the last 30 days. Based on the usage data returned by these two metrics and the commitment term chosen during the purchase process (one-year or three-year term), you will be able to predict the amount of read and write capacity units required for your Amazon DynamoDB tables provisioned in the selected AWS cloud region.

09 Navigate back to Amazon DynamoDB console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/dynamodbv2/.

10 In the main navigation panel, choose Reserved capacity

11 Choose Purchase reserved capacity to initiate the acquisition process.

12 On Purchase reserved capacity page, perform the following actions:

  1. For Provisioned capacity type, choose Read capacity units to purchase read DynamoDB capacity units or Write capacity units to purchase write capacity units.
  2. For Term, select the commitment term for the reservation. Amazon DynamoDB provides two types of commitment terms:
    • 1 year term: the reservation is made for just 1 year. This is useful for most workloads and provides lower discount rate when compared with the 3-year term.
    • 3 years term: the reservation is made for 3 years. This is mainly useful for long-running applications with predictable workloads and provides higher discount rate.
  3. For Provisioned capacity units, provide the number (integer) of read/write capacity units to provision using the reserved capacity pricing model for the Amazon DynamoDB tables available in the selected AWS region. Check the values returned at step no. 8 to determine the right amount of read/write capacity units needed.
  4. Review the price for the reservation, listed in the Pricing details section.
  5. Choose Purchase reserved capacity to submit the request and complete the purchase process.

13 Change the AWS cloud region from the navigation bar and repeat the Remediation process for other AWS regions.

References

Publication date Jan 11, 2024

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Purchase Reserved Capacity

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