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Cover image for AWS Savings Plans - Things to know !!
VijayaNirmalaGopal for AWS Community Builders

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AWS Savings Plans - Things to know !!

Hey Folks, Welcome to another episode of pricing or savings plan on AWS. Most of you must have heard or even used AWS Savings Plan for assessing your benefits on committing long term to your compute or ec2

From my experience(actually pondering over for making decisions) I found the below facts and sharing here, hoping that this gives immediate boost & confidence to those who start "AWS Savings Plans" now or after

Findings

  1. Compute savings plan is for committing long term either 1 or 3 years with Region (and Local Zone or Wavelength Zone), Tenure, OS type & payment options

  2. Not all instance types available between Region & Local Zone selections

  3. EC2 Instance savings plan has "Instance Family" in addition to the filters available in "Compute Savings Plan" and that is the main difference between Compute & EC2 plans

  4. Compute Savings Plan for Fargate - is available Region only(makes sense). CPU Architecture filter is provided to choose from x86 or ARM

  5. Savings plan state changes like " Active" or "Retired" can be alerted using AWS EventBridge events

  6. Savings will be utilized to the instance with highest discount percentage

  7. Savings plan utilization can be viewed from "AWS Cost Management Console" -> Savings Plans -> Inventory view

  8. AWS Account can have multiple savings plan and can be renewed as well

  9. Before purchasing a savings plan with "Compute" or "EC2", looking into the "Recommendations" will actually help, as "Savings Plans" -> "Recommendations" is based on usage history

  10. Commitment cannot be cancelled during the term

  11. AWS Lambda Requests doesn't give you any savings over on-demand

  12. Savings plan will be utilized after completing free-tier hours, if any

  13. Finally, to well utilize the savings plan, define the "Hourly Commitment" as appropriate as possible

Image description

Example:
Instance: u-3tb1.56xlarge
Utilization: 24 hrs a day
Utilization Hrs/Month: 2 servers * 24 hours * 31 days = 1488 hours
Savings Plan Rate: $10.52
On-demand Rate: $27.30
Hourly commitment should be: $10.52*2 = $21.04
Because (21.04 / (10.52*2))*1488 = 744 hours full utilization of SP Rate for servers

Hope these pointers help people as a heads up for their savings plan activity

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