Savings Plan and Reserved Instances

Hello,

Here’s a breakdown to help clarify the different pricing options for EC2 instances:

Reserved Instances (RIs) vs. Savings Plans:

Reserved Instances (RIs): These allow you to reserve specific EC2 instances for a 1 or 3-year term, with a significant discount (up to 75% compared to On-Demand). There are two types of RIs:

• Standard Reserved Instances: Offers a deeper discount but comes with the restriction of committing to a specific instance type and region. You can’t easily change these once purchased.

• Convertible Reserved Instances: These are more flexible than Standard RIs. You can modify the instance family, OS, and tenancy during the term. However, the discount is usually slightly lower than Standard RIs.

Here is a doc showing the difference between them.

Savings Plans: These offer a discount on your EC2 usage in exchange for a 1 or 3-year commitment, but with more flexibility than RIs. You commit to a certain amount of compute usage (measured in $/hr), not tied to a specific instance or region. There are two types:

• Compute Savings Plans: These provide the most flexibility, allowing you to switch instance types, families, operating systems, and even regions. This would be ideal if you plan to resize instances or change regions.
• EC2 Instance Savings Plans: These are tied to a specific instance family (like m6i), but they still offer flexibility in terms of size and region, which gives you more flexibility than RIs.

For your case, I would recommend going for Compute Savings Plans as you may need resizing instances, changing regions or changing instance families. Here are some examples on how billing applies to savings plans.

Hope it helps 😊