The Duckbill Guide to AWS Savings Plans
When you’re trying to cut costs on your AWS bill, you’re likely to come across AWS Savings Plans (“SPs”).
We’re sharing what we’ve learned about Savings Plans based on The Duckbill Group’s extensive experience fixing our clients’ horrifying AWS bills. In this article, you’ll learn what Savings Plans are, how to pay for them, and how they’re applied.
We’ve also created a guide to AWS Reserved Instances (“RIs”), another common vehicle for committed use discounts.
Launched in 2019, Savings Plans are a mechanism AWS provides to commit to using a certain amount of compute per hour in exchange for a discount on the instance cost. Savings Plans cover EC2, Lambda, and Fargate compute. (Separately, SageMaker has its own program, also called Savings Plans, that functions much the same as Compute Savings Plans.)
One of the things many people new to AWS get confused about is that Savings Plans are not a reservation of capacity, but rather a billing construct. In fact, the best way to think about Savings Plans is actually by using Google Cloud’s nomenclature: a committed use discount. SPs are a financial construct, not a technical one.
