An AWS Savings Plan reduces compute costs by committing to a specified level of ongoing resource consumption for one or three years. The commitment lowers the rate but reduces flexibility compared with on-demand instances. section 3.8 section 3.8.1
Choose between two EC2-related Savings Plan types:
- Compute Savings Plans apply across EC2, Fargate, and Lambda, providing more workload flexibility. section 3.8.1
- EC2 Instance Savings Plans apply only to EC2 instances in a specified region and instance family, but offer a higher discount. section 3.8.1
When purchasing a plan, specify the term, hourly commitment in US dollars, and payment option: all upfront, partial upfront, or no upfront. EC2 Instance Savings Plans also require a region and instance family. The discount varies by term, payment option, and region. section 3.8.1
A predictable EC2 workload
Committing to $1 per hour for one year and paying $8,760 upfront can provide an m5.large discount in US East (N. Virginia). The cited example gives a 31% discount with a Compute Savings Plan and 42% with an EC2 Instance Savings Plan for m5 instances in us-east-1. section 3.8.1
Table 3.2 Differences between on-demand instances, Savings Plans, and Spot Instances (view table figure)
| Dynamic workloads (e.g., for a news site) or proof of concept |
Predictable and static workloads (e.g., for a business application) |
Batch workloads (e.g., for data analytics, media encoding, etc.) |
Compare Savings Plans with on-demand instances and Spot Instances by price, flexibility, reliability, and workload scenario. section 3.8
