Savings Plans
- What it is
- Commit to a consistent hourly spend (e.g. $10/hour) for 1 or 3 years for up to ~72% off.
- The commitment is in dollars, not in a specific instance type.
- Three types
- Compute Savings Plans — most flexible. Applies across EC2 (any family, size, OS, tenancy, Region), AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda. Up to 66% off.
- EC2 Instance Savings Plans — locked to one instance family in one Region, but up to 72% off.
- SageMaker Savings Plans — applies to Amazon SageMaker AI usage.
- Not to be confused with
- Reserved Instances — commits to an instance configuration and requires management/exchange when needs change. Savings Plans adapt automatically.
- Neither reserves capacity. For guaranteed capacity, use Capacity Reservations.
- Exam signal
- “Steady-state usage but the workload mix keeps changing” → Compute Savings Plan.