There are several ways to potentially get a discount on your AWS bill payment. It’s important to understand that AWS doesn’t typically offer direct percentage-based discounts on the entire bill just for paying. Instead, discounts are usually tied to specific programs, usage commitments, or cost optimization strategies. Here’s a breakdown of the main avenues for reducing your AWS costs:
1. AWS Savings Plans:
- Concept: You commit to a consistent amount of compute usage (measured in $/hour) for a 1 or 3-year term. In return, you receive significant discounts (up to 72% compared to On-Demand prices) on the eligible compute resources.
- Flexibility:
- Compute Savings Plans: Offer the most flexibility, applying to EC2 instance usage regardless of instance family, size, AZ, Region, operating system, or tenancy. They also apply to Fargate and Lambda usage.
- EC2 Instance Savings Plans: Offer the lowest prices (up to 72% off On-Demand) but are specific to an instance family within a Region (e.g., M5 usage in N. Virginia).
- Payment Options: You can choose All Upfront, Partial Upfront, or No Upfront payment options, which affect the discount level.
- Recommendation: Analyze your steady-state compute usage and consider purchasing Savings Plans to significantly reduce your bill. AWS Cost Explorer provides recommendations based on your past usage.
2. AWS Reserved Instances (RIs):
- Concept: You reserve capacity for EC2 instances for a 1 or 3-year term in a specific Availability Zone. In return, you receive a significant discount (up to 75% off On-Demand).
- Types:
- Standard RIs: Offer the most significant discounts but are less flexible.
- Convertible RIs: Offer a smaller discount but allow you to change instance families, operating systems, and tenancies during the term.
- Payment Options: Similar to Savings Plans, you can choose All Upfront, Partial Upfront, or No Upfront.
- Recommendation: Suitable for predictable, long-term workloads with consistent instance requirements.
3. AWS Enterprise Discount Program (EDP):
- Concept: A savings program designed for large enterprise customers with a demonstrated history of significant AWS cloud usage (typically $1 million or more annually).
- How it Works: Offers a discount on the total AWS billing, with the discount percentage increasing based on total spend and the length of the commitment period (typically 1-5 years). The exact discount is negotiable and tailored to individual agreements.
- Requirements: Usually involves an annual spending commitment that is not lower than the previous year’s commitment.
- Recommendation: If your organization has a substantial and growing AWS spend, explore the EDP to realize greater cost savings across most AWS services and regions.
4. AWS Promotional Credits:
- Concept: AWS provides promotional credits for various reasons, such as for startups (AWS Activate), nonprofits, educational purposes (AWS Educate), event participation, research projects, and specific promotions.
- How They Work: Credits are applied to your AWS account and automatically offset eligible service charges.
- Limitations: Credits usually have an expiration date and may not apply to all AWS services (e.g., upfront costs for RIs or Savings Plans, AWS Marketplace fees).
- Recommendation: Explore if you are eligible for any AWS promotional credit programs.
5. Spot Instances:
- Concept: Allow you to bid on unused EC2 capacity and pay significantly lower prices (up to 90% off On-Demand).
- Risk: Spot Instances can be interrupted with little notice if the Spot price exceeds your bid or if capacity becomes unavailable.
- Recommendation: Suitable for fault-tolerant and flexible workloads that can handle interruptions.
6. Cost Optimization Strategies:
Implementing best practices for managing your AWS resources can lead to significant cost reductions:
- Right Sizing: Ensure your instances and other resources are appropriately sized for your workload. Over-provisioning wastes money. Use AWS Compute Optimizer for recommendations.
- Elasticity: Leverage Auto Scaling to automatically adjust capacity based on demand, turning off resources when they are not needed.
- Stopping Idle Resources: Turn off EC2 instances, RDS instances, and other resources when they are not in use (e.g., development environments outside of working hours). Use AWS Instance Scheduler to automate this.
- Choosing the Right AWS Region: Prices can vary between AWS Regions. Select the most cost-effective region for your needs, considering factors like latency and data transfer costs.
- Optimizing Storage: Use appropriate storage tiers (e.g., S3 Intelligent-Tiering) and manage data lifecycle policies to reduce storage costs.
- Data Transfer Optimization: Minimize data transfer out of AWS, as it is often the most expensive. Consider using services like AWS CloudFront for caching.
- Consolidated Billing: If you have multiple AWS accounts within an organization, use consolidated billing to potentially benefit from volume discounts.
- Tagging and Cost Allocation: Implement a robust tagging strategy to track costs by department, project, or environment. Use AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets to analyze and monitor your spending.
In summary, you don’t typically get a simple discount code for paying your AWS bill. Instead, you achieve cost savings by leveraging AWS’s various pricing models (Savings Plans, RIs, Spot Instances), participating in promotional credit programs, and implementing effective cost optimization strategies. The best approach is to analyze your AWS usage patterns and choose the methods that align with your workload characteristics and commitment levels. Regularly review your AWS Cost Explorer and Trusted Advisor for cost-saving recommendations.