AWS recently announced Database Savings Plans for its database services, such as Aurora, DynamoDB, DocumentDB, and Neptune.
In 2019, the company introduced Savings Plans for EC2 and Fargate. Now with Database Savings Plans, customers can, according to the company, reduce database costs by up to 35% when they commit to a consistent usage rate ($/hour) over a 1-year term. In addition, savings automatically apply each hour to eligible usage across supported database services, and any additional usage beyond the commitment is billed at on-demand rates.
Betty Zheng, a Senior Developer Advocate at AWS, explains that the database savings plan provides the flexibility to choose how workloads run while maintaining cost efficiency:
If customers are in the middle of a migration or modernization effort, they can switch database engines and adjust deployment types, such as from provisioned to serverless, as part of ongoing cost optimization, while continuing to receive discounted rates. If a customer’s business expands globally, they can also shift usage across AWS Regions and continue to benefit from the same commitment.
The AWS Billing and Cost Management Console can help customers select and purchase Savings Plans. They can start from the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, or the API, and the Database Savings Plans can be evaluated in the Recommendations view or the Purchase Analyzer.
The recommendations (accessible in the Billing and Cost Management console by selecting Savings and Commitments > Savings Plans> Recommendations in the navigation pane) are automatically generated from customers’ recent on-demand usage. At the same time, the Purchase Analyzer, designed for modeling custom commitment levels, can be used to configure the Lookback period and the Hourly commitment to simulate alternative commitment levels and see the projected impact on Cost, Coverage, and Utilization.
(Source: AWS News Blog)
The Database Savings Plans received positive feedback from the community, as a respondent in a Reddit thread commented:
Finally, and more impactful for AWS customers than all AI releases.
While Corey Quinn commented on LinkedIn:
The lesson here is clear: if you complain loudly enough, for long enough, eventually a massive corporation will do something they were probably going to do anyway, and you can pretend it was because of you.
Furthermore, Quinn concluded in a blog post on the topic that this move solidifies AWS's future direction for commitments:
… this is unambiguously where AWS is taking database commitments, and reasonably close to where I’ve wanted them to go with it. RIs aren’t disappearing tomorrow, but the writing is on the wall—and getting ahead of this now beats scrambling when you’re forced into it.
Lastly, the company states that Database Savings Plans are available in all AWS Regions outside of China.