AWS EC2 Pricing
In AWS world we pay as much as we use. Amazon offers a wide variety of payment plans from programs made for this one. For example, if you develop an apps with flexible start and end times, or that can withstand interruptions the Spot Server plan would be a good fit for you guys. Or, if we have a guess of how our usage is going to be Reserved Instances would be a good fit for us. On AWS we come across 5 different options:
- On-Demand
- Saving Plans
- Reserved Instances
- Spot Instances
- Dedicated Hosts
1) On-Demand
The apple of our eyes is the On-Demand. In other words, pay as you go. Very nice for your small quantity and flexible work. There is no prepayment or commitment. Our servers are up and running until we stop them, and we only pay for the processing time we use. E.g; Perfect for developing and testing applications or running applications with unpredictable usage patterns. However, after a certain amount of use, other plans where you can pay less per transaction will be more beneficial.
2) Saving Plans
Dear friends, we can compare this payment plan to the quota internet we use. AWS offers this payment plan, which they call Savings Plans, on several computing services, including EC2. If we give a certain amount of usage commitment for 1 or 3 years, it reduces our fees. With this payment plan, you earn 66% compared to the On-Demand plan I mentioned above. If you exceed your commitment amount, our usage is charged in accordance with On-Demand.
3) Reserved Instances
Reserved Instances is a billing discount applied to the On-Demand servers in your account. You can purchase Reserved Instances for a 1-year or 3-year term. I don’t think I need to tell you that you will have more savings with the 3-year option.
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At the end of the Reserved Instance term, you can continue to use the Amazon EC2 instance uninterrupted. However, you will be charged On-Demand rate until you do any of the following:
— Terminate the instance.
— Purchase a new Reserved Instance that matches the instance attributes (instance type, Region, tenancy, and platform).
4) Spot Instances
Spot Instances are ideal for workloads with flexible start and end times or that can withstand interruptions are not a problem. Spot Instances use unused Amazon EC2 compute capacities and provide cost savings of up to 90% on On-Demand pricing. So why is it so cheap? Because here the boss is AWS and he can take back these capacities from you if he needs it. So the reliability here is low.
When we launch an EC2 Spot Instance, if there is no available space for Spot Instance on AWS, in other words, if there is insufficient capacity, your operations on the server may be disrupted. However, this does not affect your currently running processes.
5)Dedicated Hosts
Pals as you know the one who pays the piper calls the tune. In Dedicated Hosts, AWS leases the entire physical machine directly to you. Either use it or not. You pay the same amount. As you can imagine, this is the most expensive service, but you have full reliability and full control over the machine. The machine is yours after all.
- BONUS -
What is the difference between Saving Plans and Reserved Instances?
First of all, thank you for reading my post. Did you have a question while reading it? Well, I had one. What is the difference between Saving Plans and Reserved Instances? They both looked the same. Friends, the main difference between the two is:
- Reserved Instances offer a discount against On-Demand pricing depending on committed utilization
- Whereas Savings Plans offer a discount depending on committed spend.
There are 2 types of Savings Plans: Compute Savings Plans and EC2 Instance Savings Plans. Compute Savings Plans can be applied automatically regardless of family, size, region. For example, with Compute Savings Plans, you can change from C4 to M5 instances, shift a workload from EU (Ireland) to EU (London) at any time and automatically continue to pay the Savings Plans.
In the case of EC2 Savings Plans, they’re a lot more similar to the classic Reserved Instance, requiring an organization to commit to an individual instance family in a specific region. They differ from RIs in as much as you can change the Instances type within the family. For instance, you can move from c5.xlarge running Windows to c5.2xlarge running Linux, but cannot move to A1 or T3 instances.
*Convertibl RIs: Convertible Reserved Instances: Convertible RIs give you even more flexibility and offer a significant discount (typically 45% compared to On-Demand). They allow you to change the instance family and other parameters associated with a Reserved Instance at any time. For example, you can convert C3 RIs to C4 RIs to take advantage of a newer instance type, or convert C4 RIs to M4 RIs if your application turns out to need more memory.
