Balance risk & reward

Compute Savings Plans (SPs) are an effective way to manage costs. They cover any EC2 usage, Fargate, and Lambda, and automatically track where best to apply discounts every hour. SPs are really useful if you expect your cloud spending to increase over the 1 or 3-year term.

SPs commit you to a fixed spend level until they expire. The more uncertain you are about your cloud needs, the riskier it is to rely solely on SPs for high coverage.

By purchasing SPs frequently, we create multiple expiry dates, allowing us to make adjustments more often, as your usage changes.. This approach leverages SP flexibility without the risk of long-term, high-coverage commitments. However, there is only so much flexibility that can be retained, when using an SP-only approach to rate optimization.

Provided the overall remaining value does not decrease, a convertible RI can be adjusted at any point during its 1 or 3-year term so that it applies to a different type of usage. This adjustment will apply for the remainder of the original RI’s term.

We routinely purchase small, low-cost CRIs. As each of these comes to the end of its 1 or 3-year term we convert it to cover many, higher-value instances. In this way we typically provide discount rates AWS offer on 3 year commitments while only actually committing to that usage for one month.



Making one month forecasts carries far less risk and uncertainty than 3-years.

The unit cost is the average cost per resource used. By covering most of your usage with commitment-based discounts, we ensure unit costs stay low and stable. This provides reliable savings that stretch your budget further and makes forecasting easier.