AWS have announced a new pricing feature called Savings Plans, offering a way of saving up to 72% on your compute (EC2 and Fargate) spend. Even though I suspect that in most cases the realised savings will be lower than this headline figure, there is no doubt that they will be substantial in many cases. This is a pretty big innovation in how customers can buy AWS resources.
Full details on the AWS Savings Plans web page.
Savings Plans is a new flexible pricing model that allows you to save up to 72% on Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate in exchange for a commitment to a consistent amount of compute usage (e.g. $10/hour) for a 1 or 3 year term. Savings Plans offers significant savings over On Demand usage, just like Reserved Instances, but automatically reduces your bills on compute usage across any AWS region, even as usage changes.
For members and customers who buy their AWS thru us, we will be assessing your usage and making recommendations for how best to take advantage of this new facility. For anyone else, I strongly suggest doing this analysis yourselves, even if you already make use of Reserved Instances (RIs).
Savings Plans look to give much greater flexibility than RIs in the way they can be applied, particularly from the perspective of moving workloads between EC2 and Fargate.
