Leveraging steady state discounts
Paying for the IT services you need when you need them is the very nature of paying for AWS cloud resources. This embodies the on-demand nature of the cloud and essentially comprises the trade-off of capital expenses for variable expenses. However, this isn’t the only way you can pay for what you use. In fact, Amazon EC2 instances provide you with several choices: on-demand, reserved instances (RIs), Savings Plans (SPs), and Spot.
On-demand pricing is just as it sounds – you pay for however long the instance runs at an hourly rate. AWS provides the on-demand hourly rate for each of their numerous instance types on their Amazon EC2 pricing page. The hourly rate will depend on several instance parameters such as the Region where you launch your instance, the operating system (OS), the type of instance, and the size. Intuitively, you will be charged at a higher hourly rate for a larger instance than a smaller instance.
