Structuring the Cloud Deal: End-of-Year Buying Options

The shift from buying hardware to accessing cloud services makes technology faster, easier and less expensive. It also allows you to buy using operating expenses (OpEx) instead of capital expenses (CapEx). But what if you have money that needs to be spent at the end of your budget year? Take a look at your options below.

On-Demand Instances: On-Demand Instances let you pay for compute capacity by the hour with no long-term commitments or upfront payments. You can increase or decrease your compute capacity depending on the demands of your application and only pay the specified hourly rate for the instances you use.

Reserved Instances: Reserved Instances (RIs) provide you with the ability to invest in a larger upfront payment to receive a greater discount. By using Reserved Instances, you can minimize risks, more predictably manage budgets, and comply with policies that require longer-term commitments. Additionally, you are assured that your Reserved Instance will always be available for the operating system and Availability Zone in which you purchased it.

Dedicated Instances: Dedicated Instances are Amazon EC2 instances that run in a VPC on hardware that’s dedicated to a single customer. Your Dedicated Instances are physically isolated at the host hardware level from instances that belong to other AWS accounts. Dedicated Instances may share hardware with other instances from the same AWS account that are not Dedicated Instances. Pay for Dedicated Instances On-Demand, save up to 70% by purchasing Reserved Instances, or save up to 90% by purchasing Spot Instances.

Spot Instances: Spot Instances provide you with the ability to purchase compute capacity with no upfront commitment and at hourly rates, as well as specify the maximum hourly price you are willing to pay to run a particular instance type – like Amazon EC2.

Learn what type of instance is right for you by visiting a special section of our site focused on How to Buy the Cloud.

AWS’s breadth of services and pricing options offer the flexibility to effectively manage your costs and still keep the performance and capacity your agency requires. With AWS, you can easily use the spot market, save when you reserve, and only pay for what you use.

For more information, join us for our “How to Buy Cloud Computing Services for Your Agency” webinar.