Now there’s a fundamentally new way to save on your AWS EC2 workloads without making long-term commitments or needing to perfectly forecast your workloads.

What are the AWS Reserved Instances and Saving Plans?

Not too long ago, AWS introduced new savings options for customers that, much like your cell phone plan, give you a better price per minute when you commit to a long-term contract. Both Reserved Instances and Saving Plans are AWS discount billing concepts. 

You can obtain significant discounts compared to standard on-demand EC2 pricing in return for committing to a specified level of usage, typically over 1-3 years. If you’re new to AWS reservations or saving plans, commitment means that you will pay the agreed hourly price even if you’re not using the service, e.g., if running EC2 instances.

What can go wrong with AWS Reserved Instances or Saving Plans?

As long as your workloads are predictable and relatively stable over time, AWS Reserved Instances and Saving Plans are excellent options. 

However, if at least some of your workloads are on the less predictable side or you plan to modernize your tech stack, typically it would be unwise to make long-term commitments because you’ll risk underutilizing these reservations, and thus spend more than necessary. 

In other cases, for various reasons, your CFO may not want to put long-term commitments on the books, which may also prevent you from purchasing AWS Reserved Instances or Saving Plans.

Meet Flexsave from DoiT

A technology made available by DoIT International, Flexsave is a new way to get the same savings available with convertible reservations or saving plans, but without the commitment. With Flexsave, you’ll eliminate lock-in risk for your less predictable workloads by not making commitments at all.

Flexsave will continuously monitor your workloads across all AWS accounts in your organization and will apply saving plans from our own wholesale inventory. 

If your EC2, Fargate or Lambda usage will go up, Flexsave will detect it and cover them with more commitments. When it goes down, it will automatically remove some of the commitments so you don’t overpay. 

How much can I save every month with Flexsave?

You will get savings equivalent to the discounts granted by the applicable AWS Reserved Instance 1-year full upfront commitment.

For example, AWS grants a 19.5% discount on RIs from the m5 instance family in the us-west-1 region. By comparison, a Flexsave for this machine/region combination will provide you with a 19.5% discount but without the need to commit for an entire year. How about them apples!

Unlike with RIs or Saving Plans, which require at least 50% upfront payment to get large(r) discounts, you never pay anything upfront with Flexsave.

Here is another example when comparing discounts across a 1-year Saving Plan, a 1-year (convertible) RI and, finally, with Flexsave. As shown in the table below, Flexsave provides an effective 32.80% discount versus on-demand pricing of m5.xlarge instance, making it more cost-effective than even the Saving Plan option!

Review more questions about Flexsave at https://help.doit.com/flexsave/aws

My colleague, Matan Bordo, has recorded a clever, 4-minute demo of the Flexsave in action.

Leave a note if you’re interested in learning more and getting access to Flexsave to estimate your savings!