Comparison of Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances vs. AWS Saving Plans

When should you purchase AWS through Savings Plans and when is the best strategy to buy reserved instances?

Major considerations include:

• AWS Saving Plans are commitments to a minimum dollar/hour spend, often against a specific instance family in a specific region
• Reserved Instances are commitments to a specific amount of utilization
• Currently, only EC2 and Fargate are eligible for AWS Saving Plans
• Businesses using Reserved Instances (RIs) to save money on the cost of RDS, Redshift, and ElastiCache are not currently able to use Savings Plans against these instances
• Most enterprises should utilize a mixture of RIs and Savings Plans, especially if they have made previous RI commitments
• It is not currently possible to resell underutilized Savings Plans
• One major advantage of AWS Savings Plans is they replace the manual conversion processes traditionally associated with Convertible Reserved Instances

Densify automatically recommends the optimal purchasing strategy for each of your AWS instances. Learn more and schedule a 1:1 demo at at https://www.densify.com