Difference between Savings Plans and Reserved Instance

Hi,

This detailled guide will help you understand: https://www.cloudzero.com/blog/savings-plans-vs-reserved-instances

In essence, Reserved Instances are based on the commitment to use an instance at a particular price over a specific period, while Savings Plans are based on the commitment to spend a particular dollar amount per hour over a specific period.

Best,

Didier

Hi Steven,

It really depends on the resources you would like to cover, if you want to cover compute resources (EC2, Lambda, Sagemaker), I recommend SP as the pricing model is basically the same as RI, and it has more flexibility and you are commiting to the hourly cost, unless you have requirement to resell the Standard RI. Of course for other resources such as RDS, RedShift and OpenSearch (ElasticSearch) you can only purchase RI.

You can also get some insights from this YouTube video created by AWS: Savings Plans and Reserved Instances - What purchase strategy is right for you?

Hope it helps.