30 articles on ec2 — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
Compute Savings Plans give ~66% off across families and Fargate/Lambda; EC2 Instance Savings Plans give ~72% locked to one family/region. Here's which to pick and how they differ from Reserved Instances.
Graviton (ARM) instances list ~20% cheaper than x86 with up to 40% better price-performance, across EC2, Lambda, RDS, and more. Here's the discount, where it applies, and how small the migration usually is.
Fargate costs 15-50% more per vCPU and GB than EC2, but you pay for zero idle capacity. Here's where the crossover actually is, why dense fleets favor EC2, and when Fargate's premium is the cheapest line on the bill.
Hourly rates, performance per dollar, and migration paths for AWS general-purpose EC2 families. When to migrate to m7i, when to skip straight to Graviton m7g, and when older families still make sense.
Right-sizing cuts steady-state EC2 spend 20-40% in one pass. The 20/50 rule (average under 20%, peak under 50%) finds candidates. Here's the full pipeline: gather metrics, decide size, validate against periodic peaks, deploy in waves with monitoring.
Spot instances offer 50-90% discounts but can be reclaimed with 2 minutes notice. Here's when they're worth it, how to handle interruptions gracefully, and how to combine Spot with Savings Plans for the lowest total cost.