AWS Discount Findings: RIs, Savings Plans and Spot

The AWS discount rules split into two questions. For steady workloads: would a commitment cost less than the hours you actually run? For interruptible ones: could the work run on Spot capacity? A third, narrower question applies to Bedrock: is provisioned throughput cheaper than paying per call?

Commitments on AWS

• EC2 Reserved Instance Opportunity and EC2 Compute Savings Plan Opportunity fire on running, production-classified instances not already covered. Coverage is read from billing data, and instances already running on Spot are skipped.
• RDS Reserved Instance Opportunity uses a compute-only break-even, because an RDS reservation discounts on-demand instance usage and not storage, backups or I/O.
• ElastiCache Reserved Node Opportunity treats a dev/test environment tag as a hard stop: a one-year reservation on a test cache is the wrong advice even if the name reads prod.
• EC2 RI Coverage Below 50%, RDS RI Coverage Below 50% and Savings Plan Coverage Below 30% look at the coverage you already have.

All commitment findings are advisory, with one option per 1-year or 3-year No-Upfront term that AWS’s public pricing feed actually offers, and computed on measured uptime. A break-even gate hides the suggestion when the running cost does not clear the committed cost by a margin. Background: reserved instances and savings plans.

Spot on AWS

• EC2 Spot (On-Demand to Spot) vetoes production tags and any name marking disaster recovery, backup, standby, failover or replica roles, and defers near-idle instances to rightsizing or idle rules.
• EKS Spot Node Pool for Dev/Test skips node groups already on Spot capacity.
• ECS Fargate Spot Opportunity for Dev/Test requires at least two tasks behind a load balancer.
• EMR Spot Task Nodes Opportunity prices only the on-demand task nodes, leaving primary and core nodes alone.
• SageMaker Training Job, Enable Managed Spot Training reads completed training runs that did not use Spot.

Savings come from the live on-demand and Spot rates for the specific SKU; without them the rule abstains. More on Spot instances.

Bedrock throughput

Bedrock Provisioned Throughput Below Break-Even fires when a provisioned throughput is active but its invocation volume would cost less on on-demand calls. Idle throughput is handled separately by the idle rules.

Related

Commitment coverage sits alongside the AWS rightsizing findings: rightsize first, then commit to what is left. Fact sheets: AWS reservations, Savings Plans, EC2. Full list: AWS recommendations.