Amazon recently announced the rollout of their new AWS Savings Plans, a new way to reduce your cloud compute costs. These allow you to achieve the discounts associated with their popular Reserved Instances (up to 72% off on-demand pricing) without having to engage in the headache of managing the same. With the new plans, you would commit to a particular hourly spend of your choosing on either a 1 year or 3 year fixed term.

Last week, Amazon announced the end of the reserved instance, commonly known as the “RI”, with the announcement of their new replacement, “AWS Savings Plans”.

If your business depends on AWS cloud services, you’re probably familiar with the experience of having unexpected, hidden charges crop up on your monthly invoice. At times, the AWS cost structure can be quite opaque, making it difficult to accurately gauge in advance the costs of hosting a given application. One of the most common sources of unanticipated AWS charges is the service’s data transfer fees.