Compare EC2 purchasing options and storage tiers without buying anything

Steps

1. List the Availability Zones in the Region; Spot prices are set per zone:

aws ec2 describe-availability-zones --query 'AvailabilityZones[].ZoneName' --output text

2. Read the current Spot price of a t3.micro running Linux in each zone:

aws ec2 describe-spot-price-history --instance-types t3.micro --product-descriptions 'Linux/UNIX' --start-time $(date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S) --query 'SpotPriceHistory[].[AvailabilityZone,SpotPrice]' --output table

Open the Amazon EC2 On-Demand pricing page, choose the same Region and operating system, and find t3.micro. Compare its hourly On-Demand rate with the Spot prices: Spot is spare capacity at a steep discount, and the price differs between zones and moves over time. It is cheapest because AWS can take it back after a short warning. 3. Read the Standard Reserved Instance offerings for the same type, regional scope only, leaving out third-party listings:

aws ec2 describe-reserved-instances-offerings --instance-type t3.micro --product-description 'Linux/UNIX' --instance-tenancy default --offering-class standard --no-include-marketplace --filters Name=scope,Values=Region --query 'ReservedInstancesOfferings[].[OfferingClass,Duration,OfferingType,FixedPrice]' --output table

Duration is in seconds: 31536000 is one year and 94608000 is three. OfferingType is the payment option: All Upfront, Partial Upfront or No Upfront. The more is paid up front, and the longer the term, the lower the effective rate. These are offerings to read, not purchases. 4. Run the same command with --offering-class convertible in place of --offering-class standard. The same terms and payment options appear, at slightly less of a discount: that is the price of being able to exchange the reservation for a different instance family, operating system or tenancy during its term. Every row you have seen has the scope Region, which means the discount applies in any zone of the Region but reserves no capacity. 5. Read which services each kind of Savings Plan covers:

aws savingsplans describe-savings-plans-offerings --region us-east-1 --plan-types Compute --max-results 1 --query 'searchResults[0].productTypes' --output text
aws savingsplans describe-savings-plans-offerings --region us-east-1 --plan-types EC2Instance --max-results 1 --query 'searchResults[0].productTypes' --output text

A Compute Savings Plan covers EC2, Fargate and Lambda, in some order; an EC2 Instance Savings Plan covers EC2 alone, tied to one instance family in one Region, for a larger discount. 6. Open the Amazon S3 pricing page. On the Storage tab, read down the storage classes from S3 Standard to S3 Glacier Deep Archive and see the storage rate fall. On the Requests and data retrievals tab, see that the Infrequent Access and Glacier classes add a charge to read data back, which S3 Standard does not. On the Data transfer tab, compare data transfer in from the internet with data transfer out to the internet, and find the rows for transfer to another AWS Region. Those three tabs are the dimensions the lesson lists: amount stored by class, requests and retrievals, and transfer out. 7. Prove that nothing was bought. These read your account's own reservations and plans:

aws ec2 describe-reserved-instances --query 'length(ReservedInstances)'
aws savingsplans describe-savings-plans --region us-east-1 --query 'length(savingsPlans)'

Both print 0, unless your account already held reservations or plans before this lab.