1The Risk vs Reward of Spot
Spot instances offer the biggest savings but introduce engineering challenges. You cannot run a standard database on a Spot instance, as sudden termination would cause data corruption. However, for background workers, image processing, or containerized microservices behind a load balancer, Spot instances are the holy grail of cost reduction.
2The Flexibility of Savings Plans
Historically, companies bought Standard Reserved Instances, locking themselves into a specific instance family (e.g., m5). If they needed to upgrade to m6 a year later, the RI was useless. Compute Savings Plans solve this by applying the discount to ANY compute usage, making them the modern standard for baseline cost reduction.
