Open this lesson in your favourite AI. It'll walk you through the why, explain the demo, and quiz you on the try-it list.
Compute is usually 40–60% of a cloud bill, and the difference between picking on-demand and picking the right commitment can be 70%. But commitments lock you in: a three-year reservation on the wrong instance family is a real loss. Spot/preemptible can save another 70% on top, but only for workloads you can checkpoint or restart cheaply. You need to know all four levers before your first finance review.
Pull live spot prices and compare them to on-demand for the same instance family on AWS and GCP.
Use these three in order. Each builds on the one before.
In one paragraph, explain on-demand vs reserved vs spot vs savings plans like I'm new to cloud billing, with a concrete example of when each wins.
Walk me through how AWS Savings Plans actually work step by step — how is the hourly commitment matched against usage, what counts as covered, and what happens when usage drops below the commit.
Given a CI/CD fleet that runs 200 vCPU-hours weekdays 9am–7pm UTC and almost nothing on weekends, design the optimal pricing-model mix across on-demand + spot + savings plan and justify the split.
# Spot price history for the last hour
aws ec2 describe-spot-price-history \
--instance-types t3.medium \
--product-descriptions "Linux/UNIX" \
--start-time $(date -u -v-1H '+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S' 2>/dev/null || date -u -d '1 hour ago' '+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S') \
--max-results 5 \
--query 'SpotPriceHistory[*].{az:AvailabilityZone,price:SpotPrice,ts:Timestamp}' \
--output table
# Savings Plans available rates
aws savingsplans describe-savings-plans-offering-rates \
--service-codes AmazonEC2 \
--max-results 3