AWS EC2 offers various pricing models tailored to different use cases and budgets. Understanding these models is key to optimizing your costs in the cloud.

Understanding AWS EC2 On-Demand Pricing Structure

On-Demand Instances allow you to pay for compute capacity by the hour or second, without any long-term commitments. This model is ideal for users with short-term, spiky, or unpredictable workloads that cannot be interrupted.

Savings Plans

Savings Plans offer up to 72% savings compared to On-Demand prices in exchange for a commitment to a consistent amount of usage for a 1 or 3-year term. These are suitable for workloads with steady-state usage.

Pricing for Spot Instances

Spot Instances let you use unused EC2 capacity at up to 90% off the On-Demand price. They’re recommended for applications with flexible start and end times, or for those that are only feasible at very low compute costs.

AWS EC2 Reserved Instances (RIs)

Reserved Instances offer up to 72% discount compared to On-Demand pricing. They are a good option for users with applications that have predictable usage and who can commit to using EC2 over a one or three-year term.

Dedicated Hosts

Dedicated Hosts are physical EC2 servers fully dedicated to your use. They vary in price by instance family and region, and you pay per second for active Dedicated Hosts. They are useful for workloads that require running on dedicated physical servers and for users looking to save on licensing costs.

Pricing for Windows Server on Dedicated Hosts

You can bring your existing Windows Server and SQL Server licenses to Dedicated Hosts, or use Windows Server AMIs provided by Amazon to run the latest versions of Windows Server on Dedicated Hosts. This option is common for scenarios where you have existing SQL Server licenses but need Windows Server to run the SQL Server workload.

Per-Second Billing

EC2 offers per-second billing, which can save money and is effective for resources with periods of low and high usage, such as development/testing, data processing, analytics, batch processing, and gaming applications.

The flexibility in AWS EC2’s pricing models allows for significant cost optimization based on your specific needs and usage patterns. Whether your workload is predictable or variable, there’s likely a pricing option that aligns well with your budget and operational requirements.

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