How Compute savings plan work?

Hi,

For all details about EC2 Saving Plans, have a look at the video in https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cloud-financial-management/easily-save-money-on-your-compute-spend-with-savings-plans/

This FAQ is also useful: https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/faq/

More specifically, to learn how to enroll existing instances in those plans: see the various scenarios described in https://docs.aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/latest/userguide/sp-applying.html

You may want to choose those including your existing instances automatically.

Best,

DIdier

You don't exactly "convert" your instances into savings plans. You would keep running your EC2 instances as they are, but you might purchase Savings Plan (SP) commitment. When you buy SP, you make a commitment to spend a certain $ amount of usage per hour for the whole duration of the commitment (1 year or 3 years). This $ discount then applies to your running EC2 instances (or other applicable resources like Fargate & Lambda if you biy Compute SP) each hour. It's important to remember, that you need to be running your resources close to 24/7 because the discount applies on an hourly basis. If during some hours of the day/week you are stopping your instances, then your SP discount is not utilized, and cannot be used later in the month. So, you need to have a relatively steady usage.

Check out the links to the resources shared in another answer here... If you're not sure, I suggest to start from Cost Explorer free tool in your account, where on the left side menu you will have a tab with SP recommendations - the tool will analyze your past usage and offer optimal SP commitment for you, provided that your usage patterns won't drastically change. And when you buy SP, you can later use the utilization & coverage reports in the same tool to see how much you're saving.