Pricing models

Match the EC2 purchasing option to how predictable and how interruptible a workload is. Know how Reserved Instances flex and are shared, and what data transfer and storage cost.

Compute purchasing options

• On-Demand Instances: Pay by the second or hour, no commitment. For short-term, spiky, or unpredictable work.
• Reserved Instances (RIs): 1- or 3-year commitment to an instance configuration for a large discount. For steady, predictable usage.
• Savings Plans: Commit to a $/hour spend for 1 or 3 years. Compute Savings Plans apply across EC2 (any family, size, Region), Fargate, and Lambda; EC2 Instance Savings Plans give a deeper discount for one family in one Region.
• Spot Instances: Spare capacity at up to 90% off, but AWS can reclaim it with a two-minute warning. For fault-tolerant, flexible jobs.
• Dedicated Hosts: A whole physical server for you, with socket and core visibility, for server-bound licenses (BYOL) or compliance.
• Dedicated Instances: Instances on hardware dedicated to your account, without host-level visibility.
• On-Demand Capacity Reservations: Reserve capacity in one AZ for any duration, billed at On-Demand rates whether used or not.

Reserved Instance flexibility and Organizations

• Standard vs. Convertible: Standard RIs give the bigger discount; Convertible RIs can be exchanged for different attributes, such as another instance family.
• Regional vs. zonal: Regional RIs apply in any AZ and, for Linux with default tenancy, to any size in the family. Zonal RIs also reserve capacity in one AZ.
• Sharing: With consolidated billing, RI and Savings Plans discounts are shared across accounts in an organization by default; the management account can turn this off.

Data transfer and storage pricing

• Data in from the internet is generally free. Data out to the internet and data between Regions are charged per GB. Traffic between AZs is generally charged.
• CloudFront can lower data transfer out costs by serving cached content from edge locations.
• S3 charges for storage by class, requests, retrievals (IA and Glacier classes), and data out. Colder classes cost less to store but add retrieval fees and minimum storage durations.
• EBS charges for provisioned size whether used or not; EFS charges for storage used.