Late last year I wrote about Savings Plans, and showed you how you could use them to save money when you make a one or three year commitment to use a specified amount (measured in dollars per hour) of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or AWS Fargate. Savings Plans give you the flexibility to change compute services, instance types, operating systems, and regions while accessing compute power at a lower price.

Now for Lambda

Today I am happy to be able to tell you that Compute Savings Plans now apply to the compute time consumed by your AWS Lambda functions, with savings of up to 17%. If you are already using one or more Savings Plans to save money on your server-based processing, you can enjoy the cost savings while modernizing your applications and taking advantage of a multitude of powerful Lambda features including a simple programming model, automatic function scaling, Step Functions, and more! If your use case includes a constant level of function invocation for microservices, you should be able to make great use of Compute Savings Plans.

AWS Cost Explorer will now take Lambda usage in to account when it recommends a Savings Plan. I open AWS Cost Explorer, then click Recommendations within Savings Plans, then review the recommendations. As I am doing this, I can alter the term, payment option, and the time window that is used to make the recommendations:

When I am ready to proceed, I click Add selected Savings Plan(s) to cart, and then View cart to review my selections and submit my order:

The Savings Plan becomes active right away. I can use Cost Explorer’s Utilization and Coverage reports to verify that I am making good use of my plans. The Savings Plan Utilization report shows the percentage of savings plan commitment that is being used to realize savings on compute usage:

The Coverage report shows the percentage of Savings Plan commitment that is covered by Savings Plans for the selected time period:

When the coverage is less than 100% for an extended period of time, I should think about buying another plan.

Things to Know

Here are a couple of things to know:

Discount Order – If you are using two or more compute services, the plans are applied in order of highest to lowest discount percentage.

Applicability – The discount applies duration (both on demand and provisioned concurrency), and provisioned concurrency charges. It does not apply to Lambda requests.

Available Now

If you already own a Savings Plan or two and are using Lambda, you will receive a discount automatically (unless you are at 100% utilization with EC2 and Fargate).

If you don’t own a plan and are using Lambda, buy a plan today!

— Jeff;