Difference between Savings Plans and Reserved Instance

Hi,

This detailled guide will help you understand: https://www.cloudzero.com/blog/savings-plans-vs-reserved-instances

In essence, Reserved Instances are based on the commitment to use an instance at a particular price over a specific period, while Savings Plans are based on the commitment to spend a particular dollar amount per hour over a specific period.

Best,

Didier

Hi Steven,

It really depends on the resources you would like to cover, if you want to cover compute resources (EC2, Lambda, Sagemaker), I recommend SP as the pricing model is basically the same as RI, and it has more flexibility and you are commiting to the hourly cost, unless you have requirement to resell the Standard RI. Of course for other resources such as RDS, RedShift and OpenSearch (ElasticSearch) you can only purchase RI.

You can also get some insights from this YouTube video created by AWS: Savings Plans and Reserved Instances - What purchase strategy is right for you?

Hope it helps.

It’s already 2024, and buying a server on AWS still requires planning for the next 1 or 3 years. This is mind-boggling for most companies' constantly changing business needs.

Overall, I believe that neither reserved instances nor saving plans solve the flexibility or elasticity issues of server rental, as the time commitments are always 1 year or 3 years, which is too long.

If I told you that some cloud computing providers offer monthly reserved instances that can be canceled when not needed, with partial refunds, how would you respond?

How about just copying other cloud providers, like Alibaba Cloud, and allowing users to purchase reserved instances monthly (with automatic renewal across months) and offer the option to cancel? This would give users more choices and help them avoid unnecessary losses. For example, when you need to buy a server to develop and test a new algorithm for 3 months, how would you buy a saving plan or reserved instance?