Amazon EC2 Cost and Capacity Optimization

Save money on compute with easy-to-use solutions

Spend more time building and less time managing costs

AWS has the services and tools you need to cost optimize your EC2 usage to do more in the cloud within your existing budget.

There are three ways to optimize compute costs, and AWS has the tools to help you with all of them. It starts with selecting the right instance to fine tune price-performance, then choosing the right EC2 purchase model for your workloads, and finally mapping usage to actual demand.

Why optimize cost and capacity?

Get the best price performance for a broad range of workloads on AWS and realize significant cost savings.
Reinvest savings to scale your business faster, experiment with new ideas, and do more for less cost.
Respond to changing business needs quickly by scaling resources up or down as required.
Ensure you have the right amount of resources available to meet your performance requirements.

How to optimize EC2 cost and capacity

1

Select the right instance

AWS has more than 750 instance types with most of these instances built on the AWS Nitro System. Each instance type provides a choice of processor, storage, networking, operating system, and size, so you can choose the instance configuration that best fits your specific workload and budget. Use Amazon Q EC2 instance type selector to get personalized EC2 instance suggestions based on machine learning. Or leverage tools such as Instance Type ExplorerEC2 Instance Discovery, and attribute-based instance type selection to find the best instance. Explore select cost effective instances below.

AWS Graviton-based Instances
AWS Graviton processors are designed to deliver the best price performance for your cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2. EC2 instances powered by AWS Graviton processors deliver up to 40% better price performance than comparable non-Graviton-based instances.

Amazon EC2 Flex Instances
Flex instances are great for applications that don’t fully utilize all compute resources. They deliver up to 19% better price performance than comparable non-Flex instances and provide the easiest way for you to get price performance benefits for a majority of common workloads.

Accelerated Computing Instances
AWS Trainium-based EC2 Trn1 instances deliver faster time to train while offering up to 50% cost-to-train savings over comparable Amazon EC2 instances. AWS Inferentia-based Inf2 instances are designed to deliver high performance at the lowest cost in EC2 for your deep learning deployments and deliver up to 40% better price performance than comparable EC2 instances.

2

Choose the right purchasing plans

AWS offers you flexible, cost-effective purchase models that help you meet your infrastructure needs while keeping within your budget. You can mix-and-match purchase options to maximize savings. Learn more about Amazon EC2 pricing.

On-Demand Instances
On-Demand Instances let you pay for compute capacity by the hour or second with no long-term commitments. This frees you from the costs and complexities of planning, purchasing, and maintaining hardware.

Savings Plans
Savings Plans is a flexible pricing model that can help you reduce your bill by up to 72% compared to On-Demand prices, in exchange for a one- or three-year hourly spend commitment.

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances
EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the AWS cloud and are available at a discount of up to 90% compared to On-Demand prices.

3

Rightsize your workloads

With AWS, you can access as much or as little capacity as they need, scaling up and down as required with only a few minutes of notice. And AWS intelligent optimization tools can help you provision with precision to proactively reduce your infrastructure costs. Explore AWS Cloud Financial Management solutions.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
EC2 Auto Scaling helps you maintain application availability and enables you to automatically add or remove EC2 instances using scaling policies that you define.

AWS Compute Optimizer
Compute Optimizer provides artificial intelligence and machine learning-based analytics to help you rightsize your workloads and reduce costs by up to 25%.

AWS Trusted Advisor
AWS Trusted Advisor can help you identify unused resources and opportunities to lower your costs.