# Commitment Automation Cloud commitments — Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Committed Use Discounts — deliver the largest rate discounts available on AWS, Azure, and GCP. The tradeoff is that purchasing them requires predicting your infrastructure needs over a 1–3 year window. Getting that prediction wrong has real financial consequences. A category of tools emerged specifically to reduce this risk through automation. They solve two core problems: * **Commitment laddering**: staggering commitment purchases across time so expirations are spread and you can continuously adjust your coverage as needs change * **Convertible RI exchange**: automatically exchanging Convertible Reserved Instances as your instance mix evolves, so your commitments stay aligned with your actual workload Archera includes both of these capabilities at no additional charge. But the platform also goes further — Archera underwrites your commitments against underutilization, which is something automation software alone structurally cannot provide. *** * [What is Commitment Automation?](/help-center/commitment-automation/commitment-automation-explained.md) — How laddering and convertible exchange work, why a whole vendor category was built around them, and what Archera includes for free * [Software-Only vs. Insurance-Backed Commitment Management](/help-center/commitment-automation/software-vs-insurance.md) — A structural comparison of automation tools versus Archera's insurance-backed approach, with a full feature matrix --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.archera.ai/help-center/commitment-automation/commitment-automation.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.