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What tools does AWS provide to help you understand and track your account's spending? How does AWS Cost Explorer help identify cost saving opportunities through detailed usage analysis? What is the AWS Cost and Usage Report, and how does it provide more detailed data than Cost Explorer? How can consolidated billing within AWS Organizations help reduce overall costs across multiple accounts? How can AWS Budgets Actions automatically respond to spending thresholds being exceeded, beyond just sending an alert? How should a large organization design a comprehensive cost governance strategy combining tagging, budgets, and Savings Plans across many accounts?
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What are Reserved Instances and Savings Plans, and how do they help reduce compute costs compared to On Demand pricing?

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Answer

Reserved Instances let you commit to using a specific instance type in a specific region for a one or three year term in exchange for a significant discount compared to On Demand pricing, while Savings Plans offer similar discounts but with more flexibility, letting you commit to a certain amount of compute spending per hour that can apply across different instance families, sizes, and even different compute services like EC2, Fargate, and Lambda.
aws savingsplans create-savings-plan --savings-plan-offering-id abc123 --commitment 10.0
Real-world example A company running steady, predictable workloads year round purchases a three year Compute Savings Plan committing to a certain hourly spend, reducing its overall compute costs by a significant percentage compared to paying full On Demand rates.

Common follow-ups: What is the difference between Reserved Instances and Savings Plans in terms of flexibility?;How do you decide the right commitment term and payment option for your workload?

EC2 & Compute;Auto Scaling Groups
All 7 AWS Cost Management & Billing questions