CloudFront Savings Bundle Recommendations Completely Wrong

Question

The CloudFront Savings Bundle Recommendations wizard has completely wrong numbers. I write this to inform other customers and maybe push AWS to fix it.

The wizard presents 6-12 months ago, not the most recent 6 months.

The CloudFront charges themselves are wrong when the user had a Savings Bundle previously. The charges listed are indeed what was billed for that month, but they do not compensate for an existing CloudFront Savings Bundle. It should only be looking at Usage charges.

The coverage numbers are off by 50% in our case - again because it is looking at billed charges and not Usage. Do sanity checks with your data.

The final recommendation is far too low - in our case it made sense to purchase a plan that was DOUBLE the recommendation.

I have reported this to AWS support. This is the response I got:
"Please thank the customer for the information. We'll take this as a feature request to address these issues as part of CFSSB usage calculator.
...
We do not have access to view a specific customer's savings bundle recommendations. The CFSSB recommendations are meant to provide a view into the customers usage, but it is best effort and we don't guarantee that the data in the recommendations are complete or correct. It is intended to be an estimation only. The page in the console explicitly states: "Monthly charges will be based on your actual usage of AWS services, and might vary from the estimates the calculator has provided."

Do not rely on the wizard at all! Use Cost Explorer and filter by Usage!

Craig Younkins

Answer

Thank you for sharing this information, Craig. 
We have noted this feedback for the CloudFront Security Savings Bundle's Recommendations and Estimated Savings Tool, and we are working with our service team to further improve this tool. Please note that the bill amounts that the Recommendations and Estimated Savings Tool reports for historical usage only account for the balance of usage left after CFSSB credits are applied. We understand that this may not be helpful if your CFSSB bundle has expired and you are now estimating a new bundle for your total usage. For this use case, we are evaluating ways to better display the recommended bundle amounts. As an alternative, you can always manually input your usage into the Usage Calculator tool instead

CloudFront Savings Bundle Recommendations Completely Wrong

Relevant content