Coverage Plans

Learn which commitment plans North supports, on which cloud, for which services, and through Flexbot or Autobot.

A coverage plan is a commitment North can buy from a cloud provider on your behalf. Each plan covers a defined set of services, is sized in a particular way, and is available through Flexbot, through Autobot, or through Autobot alone.

North does not offer any plan that requires an upfront payment.

See Coverage for how Flexbot and Autobot work. See Purchasing Coverage for how to buy a plan.

Plans North Supports

Plan	Cloud	Covers	Sized by	Flexbot	Autobot	Terms
Compute Savings Plans	AWS	EC2, Lambda, ECS, EKS, Fargate	Spend	Yes, 3yr only	Yes	1yr, 3yr
Database Savings Plans	AWS	RDS, ElastiCache, OpenSearch, DynamoDB, DocumentDB, Neptune, Keyspaces, Timestream, DMS	Spend	Yes	Yes	1yr
SageMaker Savings Plans	AWS	SageMaker	Spend	Yes, 3yr only	Yes	1yr, 3yr
RDS Reserved Instances	AWS	RDS	Quantity	No	Yes	1yr
ElastiCache Reserved Instances	AWS	ElastiCache	Quantity	No	Yes	1yr, 3yr
OpenSearch Reserved Instances	AWS	OpenSearch	Quantity	No	Yes	1yr, 3yr
Redshift Reserved Instances	AWS	Redshift	Quantity	No	Yes	1yr, 3yr
Compute Engine Flexible CUDs	Google Cloud	Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Run, Cloud Run Functions	Spend	No	Yes	1yr, 3yr
Cloud SQL CUDs	Google Cloud	Cloud SQL	Spend	No	Yes	1yr, 3yr
Azure Compute Savings Plans	Azure	Virtual Machines, VM Scale Sets, App Service, Container Apps, Container Instances, Functions	Spend	No	Yes	1yr, 3yr
Azure Database Savings Plans	Azure	SQL Database, SQL Managed Instance, Cosmos DB, Database for MySQL, Database for PostgreSQL, Database Migration Service, Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra	Spend	No	Yes	1yr

Savings Plans and Reserved Instances

The two instruments behave differently, and the difference decides which one fits a workload.

A Savings Plan commits you to an amount of spend per hour. It applies to whatever eligible usage runs, up to that amount, whichever instances produce that usage. You can change instance type, size, family, or region, and the commitment keeps applying.

A Reserved Instance reserves specific capacity. When you buy one, you specify the instance type and the region. For RDS, ElastiCache, OpenSearch and Redshift you also specify the database engine. The reservation applies only to usage that matches what you specified. If you move that workload, the reservation stays behind.

This is why Reserved Instances are available through Autobot only. A reservation is a whole unit of specific capacity, so there is no single amount that a customer can buy to reach a coverage target. Autobot sizes it against your fleet instead.

What a Plan Covers Inside a Service

A plan covers particular usage within a service. It does not cover everything that the service bills.

Savings Plans

• Lambda. Duration and provisioned concurrency are covered. Requests, storage, and data transfer are not.
• Fargate. vCPU, memory, and Windows OS hours are covered. Ephemeral storage is not.

Reserved Instances

A Reserved Instance covers instance hours and node hours. Storage, backup, snapshots, provisioned IOPS and throughput, serverless capacity, data transfer, and extended support are not covered.

Choosing Which Instances Count

A Reserved Instance reserves specific machines, so Autobot needs to know which machines to size against. You control that with a policy scope.

The policy scope lets you exclude instances from the coverage estimate. North then sizes your coverage against what is left. Set it on the Commitments page, on the plan you are setting a policy for.

Only RDS, ElastiCache, OpenSearch and Redshift Reserved Instances carry a policy scope. Savings Plans do not carry one. A Savings Plan applies to any eligible instance, so excluding one would change nothing.

Four rules govern the scope:

• You exclude instances. You do not add them. Every instance is in scope until you take it out.
• The scope is set for one commitment type at a time.
• An exclusion is reversible. Put an instance back in scope, and North includes it again.
• A new instance you add to your fleet is in scope automatically.

RDS Is Eligible for Two Plans

RDS usage can be covered by a Database Savings Plan, and it can be covered by an RDS Reserved Instance. North builds a recommendation for both. North prefers the Savings Plan, because a Savings Plan leaves your architecture free to change.

The savings quoted for the two plans describe the same underlying usage. They do not add together.

Savings Plans Under Flexbot

Flexbot supports Savings Plans only. Three plans are available through Flexbot: Compute Savings Plans, Database Savings Plans, and SageMaker Savings Plans.