Savings Plans vs Reserved Instances in Practice

~8 min read

Why Savings Plans have become the more commonly recommended commitment-discount mechanism.

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Key points

  • Reserved Instances: commit to a specific instance configuration, less flexible, can become mismatched to changing architecture
  • Compute Savings Plans: commit to a $/hour spend level, applies flexibly across instance types/families and even Fargate/Lambda
  • EC2 Instance Savings Plans: middle ground, deeper discount, committed to instance family but flexible on size within it
  • Savings Plans are the generally recommended default today due to their flexibility versus traditional RIs