On Demand Instances

standard rate, no-commitment, no discount

good for short-term or unpredictable workloads which can't be interrupted.

Reserved Instances

1 or 3 year commitment --> up to 75% discount (depending if All/Partial/No Upfront)

Reserved Instances can be Standard or Convertible (which can change Family, OS , tenancy and payment option, on top of AZ, instance size, networking type)

Scheduled Reserved Instances

You can reserve instances that can be used on a recurring schedules. Min 1200 hours per year, can be used for reporting apps, running at regular intervals ( like min 6h-a day 4 days a week) - They are currently deprecated

Spot Instances

Bid for unused capacity, up to 90% discount BUT they can be terminated at any time.

Useful for workloads with flexible start and end times, for Cost-sensitive workloads that can afford to be interrupted.

Dedicated Instances

Physical isolation at the host hardware level from instances of other AWS customers!

Pay per instance

Dedicated Hosts

Physical server dedicated for you.

Full visibility of sockets and cores and targeted instance placement.

Pay per host.

Useful for workloads with server bound software licenses (like applications that use per-socket licensing).

Saving Plans

Commitment to a consistent amount of usage

Pay by $/h - Require a commitment of 1-3 years Fargate, Lambda and EC2 and in case of EC2 only within selected region and Instance Family.