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I previously worked in this space and have a fair bit of experience optimising AWS spend for customers.

Cool idea! I see the pain point you are addressing here is friction in the marketplace, rather than simply cost optimisation? Traditionally the use of standard RIs was a pain, due to the inflexibility of moving between instance families. And the fact that the marketplace requires a US bank account which made it a no-go for non-US customers.

However, these problems were addressed first through the use of convertible RIs. Which allow exchange of instance types, but can't be sold on the marketplace (from memory). But, to be honest, they were still a pain to manage. You needed a good cost person, or a good TAM to keep on top of the required conversions. So, secondly, savings plans were introduced. I generally recommend compute savings plans these days, as they are much more set and forget, though I acknowledge provide less discount than standard RIs. My personal opinion is that EC2 based RIs will probably be deprecated by AWS at some point in the future. For this reason I don't think its likely they'll release this automated marketplace as a feature in future.

I work almost exclusively with enterprise customers and see very little use of standard RIs these days, which given the marketplace angle I'm assuming is the only purchase option you are working with? Are you doing zonal or regional scope? But if you can find an angle that means customers can make more efficient use of standard RIs all the power to you, that is a win!

Recommendation wise, the native tools (Cost Explorer and the CUR) can deliver reasonable recommendations that are good enough for most customers. Especially when using more flexible purchase options like compute savings plans the need to be super accurate just isn't there anymore.




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