Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offers a variety of pricing options for customers to choose from, depending on their specific needs and usage patterns.
The most common pricing options for EC2 are.
On-Demand instances
These instances allow customers to pay for computing capacity by the hour or the second, with no long-term commitments. This is a good option for customers with unpredictable or fluctuating workloads.
Reserved Instances
This option allows customers to pay a low, one-time payment for a reserved instance, and in exchange, they get a lower hourly rate for the instance. This option is best for customers with steady-state or predictable usage.
Spot instances
These instances allow customers to bid on spare Amazon EC2 computing capacity. This option is suitable for customers with flexible start and end times and applications that are tolerant to interruption.
Dedicated instances
These instances are physically isolated at the host hardware level, and are dedicated to a single customer. This option is for customers who require additional control and isolation for their instances.
The prices for EC2 instances vary depending on the instance type, region, and operating system. Prices also vary for different instance types, for example, general-purpose instances are cheaper than memory-optimized instances, and GPU instances are more expensive than others.
AWS also offers additional services, such as Elastic Block Store (EBS) for storage, Elastic IPs for IP addresses, and Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) for distributing incoming traffic across instances. These services also have their own pricing, which is based on usage and can be found on the AWS website.
AWS provides a cost estimator tool that can help customers to estimate the costs of using different EC2 instance types and configurations, as well as other AWS services. Additionally, customers can use the AWS Cost Explorer to analyze and optimize their costs over time.