Amazon EC2 pricing

On demand instances are ideal for short-term, irregular workloads that cannot be interrupted. The instances run  continuously until you stop them, and you pay for only the compute time you use.

Reserved instances are a billing discount applied to the use of On-demand instances in your account. There are two available types of Reserved instances:

• Standard Reserved Instances: These are EC2 instances with static characteristics.
• Convertible Reserved Instances: These EC2 instances can be change to different Availability Zones or different instance types. Trade flexibility in exchange of a higher cost.

EC2 Instance Savings Plans are commitments to an instance family and Region for a 1-year or 3-year term. The EC2 Instances Saving Plans are a good option if you need flexibility in your Amazon EC2 usage over the duration of the commitment term.

Spot Instances are ideal for workloads with flexible start and end times, or that can withstand interruptions.

•  If you make a Spot request and Amazon EC2 capacity is available, your Spot Instance launches. However, if you make a Spot request and Amazon EC2 capacity is unavailable, the request is not successful until capacity becomes available. The unavailable capacity might delay the launch of your background processing job.

Dedicated Hosts are physical servers with Amazon EC2 instance capacity that is fully dedicated to your use.

• You can use your existing per-socket, per-core, or per-VM software licenses to help maintain license compliance. You can purchase On-Demand Dedicated Hosts and Dedicated Hosts Reservations. Of all the Amazon EC2 options that were covered, Dedicated Hosts are the most expensive.