agent recommended a 3-year reserved instance for a service the roadmap deprecates in 8 months
Stops a cost agent from locking in multi-year commitments for workloads with a known end date. Use when an RI or savings plan recommendation ignores a deprecation or migration timeline. It caps commitment terms at the workload's planned lifetime, checks recovery options for already-bought commitments, and requires a lifetime citation in the agent's purchase workflow.
TL;DR: Never buy a commitment longer than the workload will live. Check the service roadmap before any RI or savings plan purchase, and cap the term at the workload's remaining lifetime. An agent optimizing on two years of steady history will happily recommend a 3-year RI for a service that dies in 8 months - the roadmap lives in docs, not in CloudWatch.
agent recommended a 3-year reserved instance for a service the roadmap deprecates in 8 months- Check the service roadmap and confirm the deprecation date. Talk to the service owner; do not guess from the agent's data. Expected: a confirmed date or quarter when the workload goes away or migrates.
- Cap every commitment term at the workload's remaining lifetime. If the service dies in 8 months, the longest commitment you buy is 1-year, and only if the math still works for 8 months of use. Expected: no 3-year commitment exists for a workload that will not live 3 years.
- If the agent already bought the RI, check modification and marketplace options. A 3-year RI can sometimes be split, modified to another instance family, or listed for sale. Expected: you know the recovery options and their costs before deciding to eat the commitment.
- Add a roadmap check to the agent's purchase workflow: every RI or savings plan recommendation must cite the workload's planned lifetime and show the term does not exceed it. Expected: recommendations without a lifetime citation get rejected automatically.
Use this when
- An agent recommended a 1-year or 3-year commitment for a workload that is being deprecated or migrated
- Commitment purchases are happening without roadmap input
- You need the agent to check planned lifetime before recommending RIs or savings plans
Not for this skill when
- The workload is stable with no deprecation planned - long commitments are the right call
- The deprecation is just a migration to a new instance family - convertible RIs or instance savings plans may still work
- A human already approved the purchase knowing the timeline - that is a process problem, not an agent problem
Variant phrasings
- agent bought 3 year ri for service being shut down
- reserved instance recommendation ignored deprecation roadmap
- how to stop cost agent committing to dying workloads
- ri purchase for workload migrating next year
Why it happens
Agents optimize on usage history, and a workload with 2 years of steady history looks like a perfect 3-year RI candidate. Roadmaps live in docs and people's heads, not in CloudWatch. The agent did the math right on the wrong assumption: that the past predicts the future for this workload.
Edge cases
- Deprecation dates slip. Re-check the roadmap quarterly and be ready to modify or sell commitments if the date moves out.
- Partial migrations (half the fleet moves, half stays) still support a smaller commitment. Size it to the staying portion, not the whole fleet.
- Convertible RIs soften this mistake but do not erase it. You can change the instance family, not the end date.
Provenance
Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_9dyjJjMYL0p9u7QyErH9Ig
Maintainer review
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This records the version a maintainer checked. It does not assert that the version is the latest upstream release.