Database Savings Plans

During AWS Reinvent this year, I was on a call with one of my larger customers’ AWS reps when they informed us that AWS had just dropped new Database Savings Plans that allowed up to a 35% discount.

It was so new that the AWS reps didn’t have any details they could share yet.

With that said, over the next few months, I will likely start cycling my clients into these plans using the same guidelines I have been writing about.

Something interesting I observed about DB savings plans in general is that you never get near the savings rate that you get for compute spend.

I figured that, as opposed to just raw compute resources, DB has the additional cost of long-term storage.

So even if you turned off the DB completely and it wasn’t servicing queries, it has the cost of storage of the entire dataset that is stored on the DB. Given that cost is a constant (if the data were flat), they can’t discount it as deeply.

Just an observation. Let me know if you have another theory.

Either way, I just wanted to make sure these new savings plans are on your radar.

If you need help figuring out a good repeatable strategy for long-term savings, please feel free to reach out to me.