Amazon EC2 Cost and Capacity Optimization

Save money on compute with easy-to-use tools and services

With AWS cost and capacity optimization services and tools, you can spend more time building and less time managing compute 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 important ways to optimize compute costs, and AWS has the tools to help you with all of them. It starts with choosing the right EC2 purchase model for your workloads, then selecting the right instance to fine tune price-performance, and finally mapping usage to actual demand. Whether you’re running steady-state or spiky workloads, purchasing EC2 through AWS Savings Plans and Amazon EC2 Spot Instances can help you significantly save over On-Demand Instance pricing. Once you’ve selected the right EC2 purchase model and instance use for your workload, services like AWS Compute Optimizer and Cost Explorer can help you select the right instance to balance cost and performance, and rightsize your EC2 environment. EC2 Auto Scaling can then help you scale your compute capacity up and down based on observed demand. Cost optimization allows you to respond quickly to changing customer needs and invest savings back into your organization, resulting in faster innovation.

Why optimize cost and capacity?

Save Costs

Save up to 90% on EC2 costs by using Spot Instances and save up to 72% with AWS Savings Plans. This is on top of the up to 10% cost saving you gain by rightsizing your workloads with AMD-based instances or the up to 20% lower cost by migrating to AWS Graviton2-based instances.

Innovate Faster

You can reinvest the money you save to access more compute to scale your business faster, experiment with new ideas, and ultimately do more for less cost.

Increase Agility

Free up your resources so you can cost-effectively scale your application to meet customer demand, accelerate performance, and react quicker to customer needs and industry trends.

Streamline Selection

You can easily select the correct instance type and rightsize your compute environment using AWS recommendations, which are based on millions of simulations.

Reduce Cost with EC2 Instances

Amazon EC2 provides the broadest and deepest portfolio of compute instances with over 300 instances to choose from that offer customers computing options to help them tailor compute to meet their business needs.

EC2 instances powered by AMD EPYC processors deliver up to 10% lower cost versus comparable instances. Since many workloads utilize only a fraction of the processor's maximum performance, these instances offer a better fit for many workloads. These instances are available now in the EC2 compute optimized (C5a), general purpose (M5a), general purpose burstable (T3a), and memory optimized (R5a) instance families.

EC2 instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors deliver up to 20% lower cost versus comparable x86 instances. Graviton2-based instances are custom built by Amazon Web Services using 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores to deliver the best price performance for your cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2. These instances are available now in the EC2 general purpose (M6g), compute optimized (C6g), and memory optimized (R6g) instance families.

Products and services

Savings Plans

Save up to 72% on EC2, Fargate, and Lambda, when you commit to a consistent amount of usage (measured in $/hour) with a 1 or 3-year term. Savings Plans are similar to Reserved Instances in that they are commitment-based, but offer more flexibility as the savings can be applied across different instance types and Regions.

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EC2 Spot Instances

Take advantage of unused EC2 capacity for up to 90% off On-Demand pricing. Spot Instances are perfect for fault-tolerant, stateless applications like containers, big data, AI/ML and more.

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EC2 Auto Scaling

Improve application resiliency and availability by automatically adding or removing EC2 instances and by mixing multiple purchase options and instance types. EC2 Auto Scaling ensures you are not over or under-provisioning compute to match application demand.

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AWS Compute Optimizer

Take the guess work out of selecting the right instance. AWS Compute Optimizer recommends instances that balance performance and cost for running workloads. By using the rightsizing recommendations you can save up to 25% on EC2 costs.

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EC2 Instance Discovery

Rightsize your compute environment before starting your workload. Specify your hardware requirements and EC2 Instance Discovery will serve you a list of compatible instances to compare across CPU, memory, storage, networking performance, regional presence, pricing, and more.

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AWS Cost Explorer

Eliminate underutilized resources with AWS Cost Explorer. AWS Cost Explorer identifies underutilized EC2 instances that may be downsized within the same instance family and provides forecasted spend based on optimization changes you make.

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Customer stories

“For us, the ability to forecast our expenditure without worrying about unexpected bills is a huge relief. The AWS Cost Explorer tells us exactly where our money is going and what we can do to reduce costs further.”

Dean Jezard, Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder

“Running our microbiome research on Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, we spend less money and less time to get scientific answers from the analysis. By accelerating our research processes on AWS, we can get closer to developing therapeutics to fight cancer.”

Sam Minot, PhD and Staff Scientist

“With AWS Compute Optimizer, we have a single pane of glass to identify optimal EC2 instance types for our workloads across our AWS environment. The ability to visualize projected resource utilization on various instance types will allow us to make more informed decisions before we update our fleet.”

Renan Capaverde, Director of Engineering