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Amazon Introduces CloudFront Security Savings Bundle

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AWS has recently introduced Amazon CloudFront Security Savings Bundle, a pricing plan that gives a 30% discount on CloudFront in exchange for a one-year commitment. The savings bundle also includes free AWS Web Application Firewall requests up to 10% of the committed amount.

Saving plans were already available on AWS for compute usage and discounts were applied on the CDN traffic for large commitments, but CloudFront Security Savings Bundle is the first offer that is self-service on data traffic and available to all accounts. Previously customers had to make certain minimum traffic commits, typically 10 TB/month or higher, to access private pricing.

The new plan includes all 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, and Lambda@Edge charges. The FAQs section provides some examples:

Making a commitment of $100 of CloudFront usage per month would cover a $142.86 worth of CloudFront usage for a 30% savings compared to standard rates. Additionally, up to $10 of AWS WAF usage is included.

On demand charges apply to any usage above the monthly commitment and any discount applies to usage across all accounts within an AWS Organization/consolidated billing family. A savings estimator based on historical usage or manual inputs is available on the CloudFront console and multiple savings bundles can be added at different times to cover growth in usage.

Anders Bjørnestad, cloud evangelist at Webstep AS and AWS Community Hero, wrote an article reviewing the new option and advising to double check the suggested commitments:

AWS is giving you recommendations for suggested savings, but it does not look like it grabs all the data (correct?) which might lead to a lower recommendation than you would need. (...) Be aware that you are paying for the requests going through CloudFront so you would need to enter the average size carefully as it is used to calculate the number of requests. If you set the object-size too large, your cost will likely be too low.

The new option is located in the CloudFront console, and not in the billing one like other saving plans, a choice that Steffen Gebert, director technology infrastructure at EMnify, questions:

"CloudFront Security Savings Bundle" - to make this some sort of Savings Plan would have required that two teams talk to each other?

Reactions on Reddit have been mixed. While some users would have preferred a lower price for on-demand usage, others report issues with the calculator but appreciate the simplicity of the new option:

That took all of five minutes to save a bunch of money. Their calculator wasn't too accurate, but I just went through 12 months of bills, put the values in Excel and came up with a decent target to cover.

Google Cloud offers commitment-based discounts on Cloud CDN but targets only large volumes, above one PB per month. Azure follows a similar approach with only enterprise customers with minimum monthly traffic commitments eligible to discounted pricing on Azure Content Delivery Network.

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