How can CloudFront Security Savings Bundle save up to 30% on your Amazon CloudFront costs?

Introduction

The CloudFront Security Savings Bundle is a flexible self-service pricing plan that helps you save up to 30% on your Amazon CloudFront costs by committing to a consistent amount of monthly usage over a 1-year term. As an added benefit, AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) can be utilized to protect your CloudFront resources free of charge, up to 10% of your committed plan amount. Any usage beyond what is covered by the CloudFront Security Savings Bundle will be charged at standard rates. 

CloudFront Security Savings Bundle applies to any CloudFront billed usage types including data transfer out, data transfer to origin, HTTP/S request fees, field level encryption requests, Origin Shield, invalidations, dedicated IP custom SSL, Anycast Static IPs, Lambda@Edge, CloudFront Functions, real-time logs, Regional Edge Cache usage, gRPC, WebSocket support, and other CloudFront features.

How To Purchase CloudFront Security Savings Bundle (CFSSB)

You can get started with the CloudFront Security Savings Bundle by visiting the CloudFront console to get recommendations on commitment amount based on your historical CloudFront and AWS WAF usage or by entering in your own estimated monthly usage.

CloudFront Security Savings Bundle can be purchased in any account within an AWS Organization. If credit sharing is turned on, the benefits provided by the Savings Bundle are applicable to usage across all accounts within an AWS Organization. See AWS Credits to learn more how AWS credits apply across single and multiple accounts.

Any time prior to the expiration of your savings bundle term, you can choose to opt-in to automatically renew the CloudFront Security Savings Bundle for another 1-year term.

As your usage grows, you may purchase additional CloudFront Security Savings Bundles to obtain discounts on incremental usage.

How to Visualize CFSSB Savings through Cost Explorer

You can visualize CFSSB savings as well as calculate the monthly spend commitment through Cost Explorer. Your monthly CFSSB commitment charges will appear as “CloudFront Security Bundle” on your bill and Cost Explorer.

Below you can see that customer is charged a $35K monthly commitment for “CloudFront Security Bundle.” The rest of the $7K monthly spend appears as “CloudFront”, which is the CloudFront cost not covered by the CloudFront Security Bundle. 

Many enterprise customers sign an Enterprise Agreement, which includes enrollment into the Enterprise Discount Program (EDP). As shown below, it’s recommended to exclude EDP discounts in Charge Type filter to identify your undiscounted costs.

If you’d like to see the total CloudFront spend without CFSSB discounts. You can remove “CloudFront Security Bundle” from Service filter and exclude the “Credit” along with “Enterprise Discount Program Discount” in Charge type filter. If our example customer didn't commit to the CFSSB, the total CloudFront cost would have increased by $15K per month, as shown below.

In this example, $50K spend is discounted by 30% (i.e. $15K) and is covered by $35K commitment to CloudFront Security Savings Bundle.

If they were to cover the remaining $7K through CFSSB, they can purchase an additional savings bundle using calculation below:

        Monthly CFSSB Commitment = Uncovered CloudFront spend * 0.70

The example customer can purchase an additional CFSSB Commitment of $4,900 ($7000*0.70) or, if the existing CFSSB is close to expiry, they can commit $39,900 to cover the full CloudFront spend of $57K per month.

Alternative Option to Save on CloudFront Costs

Customers with increasing use of CloudFront who expect to outgrow the monthly commitment can reach out to their AWS account team to discuss a custom pricing agreement for CloudFront. Custom discounted pricing is available for customers willing to commit to a minimum of 10 TB of data transfer per month for 1-year or longer. However, it's important to note that a customer may only subscribe to a custom pricing agreement or CFSSB, but not both.

Conclusion

AWS offers options to customers to save up to 30% on CloudFront costs through CloudFront Security Savings Bundle in exchange for a 1-year commitment. It’s simple to calculate the recommended commitment using Cost Explorer. Alternatively, you can use CloudFront console to review historical usage, calculate, purchase and renew the CloudFront Savings Bundle. 

Resources

• CloudFront Security Savings Bundle: FAQs - https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/faqs/#topic-21
• AWS Cost Optimization: CloudFront - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8De2AfAN3k
• Amazon CloudFront Pricing - https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing