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I have a small single-instance deployment running on an EC2 instance which hosts both a web application and its database (MySQL). I've been looking to separate the deployment out into an EC2 instace for the web app and an RDS cluster for the database, and wanted to take advantage of the new AWS Savings Plans for both if possible.

My questions the are:

  1. AWS Savings Plans seem to only apply to 'pure' compute EC2 instances, not to RDS instances as well. Can someone confirm or disprove this?
  2. If Savings Plans did apply to RDS instances, is there a reason to not use them, and instead just use an Instance Reservation?
Lamanus
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Sergio Leon
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3 Answers3

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Since August 2020, AWS Savings Plans includes:

  • Amazon EC2
  • AWS Lambda
  • AWS Fargate

They do not apply to Amazon RDS db instances. For those, you can continue to use Amazon RDS Reserved Instances.

John Rotenstein
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  • Incomplete. It does apply to a wild range of compute solution (EC2, Lambda, Fargate) https://pages.awscloud.com/Introducing-Savings-Plans-for-Amazon-EC2-AWS-Fargate-and-AWS-Lambda_2020_0228-CMP_OD.html – Atheryl Jul 09 '21 at 08:00
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I want to clarify that even though Savings Plans do not cover RDS instances, they do cover EC2 instances that are part of EMR, ECS and EKS Clusters. Based on this link:

"Both plan types apply to EC2 instances that are a part of Amazon EMR, Amazon EKS, and Amazon ECS clusters. Amazon EKS charges will not be covered by Savings Plans, but the underlying EC2 instances will be. "

Also, Compute Savings Plans also apply to your Fargate and Lambda usage.

Techfritters
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We moved to RDS from EC2 instances running self installed MySQL years ago. For me, at has been great. All of the RDS features work flawlessly, point and click, without the mundane work of spinning up, replicating, backing up, and failing over databases. It simply works great. Use reserved instances if you plan on keeping for at least a year. At 30% savings the cost is awash even if you bail on the server after about 9 months and don't use the entire year. Plus you can sell the unused remaining on the marketplace.

Downsides?

  1. You do NOT get command line OS access to the MySQL server. You get an admin login to mySQL. The only way to manage it is through the AWS UI and the mysql client command line or managing client (like MySQL Workbench or Heidi).
  2. You may want to run a mysqldump script on a separate EC2 to dump databases separately/additionally. AWS does SNAPSHOTS which require an entire restore of a sandbox server just to get a single table someone botched up, for example. I go to the MySQLdump files all the time. Never have needed the SNAPSHOT unless I am spinning up a sandbox copy of the entire instance for some reason.

In a nutshell, mySQL on RDS is great.

One other side note. We migrated an app using MySQL5.7 to Aurora MySQL with absolutely zero issues. Complete drop-in replacement (in our case).

Robert Iglehart
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  • Thank you for sharing your experience about RDS. Could you also share your experience about migration from MySQL5.7 to Aurora MySQL? What are the results of it? Thanks. – Ferhat S. R. Jan 06 '23 at 09:02
  • "Plus you can sell the unused remaining on the marketplace." Heads-up that this only applies to EC2 reserved instances. RDS reserved instances cannot be sold on the marketplace. – ErJab Jan 24 '23 at 18:41