Amazon is introducing AWS Savings Plans, a billing model that delivers the same savings in an easier to understand format.
Amazon Web Services has taken a lot of criticism for labyrinthine billing schema, a problem the cloud computing platform is seeking to remediate with the instance of “Savings Plans,” an easier to understand repackaging of the same (percentage-wise) discounts.
AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr describes Savings Plans as “a new and flexible discount model that provides you with the same discounts as Reserved Instances, in exchange for a commitment to use a specific amount (measured in dollars per hour) of compute power over a one or three year period.”
SEE: Amazon Web Services: An insider’s guide (free PDF) (TechRepublic)
Two types of savings plans are available. Compute Savings, the replacement for Convertible Reserved Instances, apply automatically to any EC2 instance, including EMR, ECS, or EKS clusters, and provides up to a 66% discount. EC2 Instance Savings Plans apply to specific instance families in a region, providing up to a 72% discount, like Standard Reserved Instances.
Corey Quinn, cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, notes in a blog post that this “amounts to nothing less than a complete overhaul of the AWS compute pricing model,” calling it a “long-overdue and welcomed change” though in typical fashion, also notes that the name “sounds like a bank’s Christmas Club account offering.”
In comments to TechRepublic, Quinn noted that “this represents an incredible simplification of the compute purchasing process that upends the entire cost optimization SaaS industry (e.g., Cloudability, CloudHealth), potentially causing serious negative impact for those companies due to this simplification.”
“What once took entire teams to handle at some large AWS customers can now be done on the back of a napkin over lunch, saving some customers millions upon millions in overhead costs.”
For more, check out “Microsoft’s Azure Arc multicloud offering unifies management of Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud” and “AWS billing is broken and Kubernetes won’t last, says irreverent cloud economist Corey Quinn” at TechRepublic.
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