Our CTO Jeremy Steinert shares his take on AWS discounts.
Who doesn’t like a good discount or sale? We are often asked if there are indeed discounts that can be had for AWS customers. A recently published article, Reduce AWS costs with volume discounts, Reserved Instances, touches on the right points but I thought it might help to clarify and provide some additional perspective. Here are a few ways you can cut costs on AWS:
Volume Discounts Based on Consumption
There are certain services within AWS that allow for volume discounts based on consumption. What many companies don’t realize is that they can combine the billing for multiple AWS accounts within their organization. This can help you take advantage of volume discounts for consumption across all of your accounts while still maintaining a logical separation between different teams. This will often lead to a rate reduction beyond certain limits for the most commonly-used services in the AWS portfolio.
Reserved Instances
Beyond discounts, another cost savings measure is reserved instances. An AWS user can choose to pay a full, partial, or no upfront cost on EC2 instances and pay a lower hourly rate for any remainder for the duration of a one or three-year term agreement.
Spot Instances
Another area for big savings within AWS is spot instances, which are spare compute resources that AWS may have at any given time. These spare resources are auctioned off at rates lower than the standard. As an AWS user, you can utilize scripts and API calls to automatically bid on these resources at rates and times that you decide. The resources can never be relied upon, however, so it’s often best used with an application design that can take advantage of spare resources as they are available. As an example, they could be used for temporary batch processing jobs which aren’t business critical.
Do any of these apply to your AWS spend? Interested in adopting AWS? We can help. Check out our AWS Adoption Program.
