Recently, AWS announced instant price reductions and Savings Plans for Amazon SageMaker, their fully-managed Machine Learning (ML) service. With Savings Plans for Amazon SageMaker, customers can benefit from cost savings up to 64% compared to the on-demand price. The company also drops the price of several instance families in Amazon SageMaker by up to 14.2%.
In the fall last year, the company reduced prices for the ml.p3 and ml.p2 instances in Amazon SageMaker by up to 18%. And now AWS will also reduce the prices for instances families ml.t2, ml.t3, ml.m4, ml.m5, ml.m5d, ml.c4, ml.c5, ml.c5d, ml.c5n, ml.r5, ml.r5d, and ml.inf1. Furthermore, according to an AWS News blog, the price reductions will also apply for all instance-based workloads such as Notebook instances, Amazon SageMaker Studio instances, Training instances, Batch Transform instances, Real-time Endpoint instances, Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler instances, and Amazon SageMaker Processing instances.
Next to the instant price reductions, AWS also introduces savings plans for AWS SageMaker. The company introduced this new, flexible discount model in November 2019 for Compute Services Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate to help customers optimize their compute cost. The model offers the same discounts as Reserved Instances (RI), a discount model that has been around for years.
Amber Gregorio, senior product marketing manager at CloudHealth by VMware, wrote in a blog post about Savings Plans versus RIs:
Compute Savings Plans are easier to manage too. While Convertible Reserved Instances can be exchanged for different types of instances, the process is manual and requires considerable oversight and usage monitoring. With Compute Savings Plans, discounts are applied automatically across all applicable components, significantly reducing management overhead.
Savings Plans are accessible from the AWS Cost Explorer in the AWS Management Console or via the AWS CLI or API. The Cost Explorer provides users with recommendations based on their historical usage over a selected period (7, 30, or 60 days) to realize the most optimum savings. And by signing up for Amazon SageMaker Savings Plans, the Savings Plans rates will automatically apply across all eligible usage up to the commitment amount.
Julien Simon, an artificial intelligence & machine learning evangelist at AWS, wrote in the News Blog post:
Savings Plans don’t distinguish between instance families, instance types, or AWS regions. This makes it easy for you to maximize savings regardless of how your use cases and consumption evolve over time, and you can save up to 64% compared to the on-demand price.
Lastly, Savings Plans and instant price reductions are currently available in various American, European, Middle-East, Africa, and Asia Pacific AWS regions. The pricing details for Amazon SageMaker and its Savings Plans are available on the pricing page.
