[fragmede]

AWS has clear upfront pricing, but they're a large enterprise company so if you're a large customer, and you're not getting a discount, you're definitely getting screwed. No one talks about that because it's all covered by NDAs covering backroom deals, but you can be sure Netflix isn't paying list pricing for EC2 instances.

Having to convert between Reserved Instance families to save money, while tricking people into thinking that this is good for them, is a masterstroke of AWS' sales department. Wouldn't you rather be working on the product rather than optimizing RI counts?

[donor20]

I've never felt tricked by RI. Is there some value to a cloud provider if I commit to three years of an instance type that might night have much new adoption after 1 or 2 years? I suspect so. They seemed to price based on that. What's the "trick"? Standard a1.medium instance for 3 years runs $7/month. Not unreasonable

If you don't want to do that use savings plans.

If you like talking to sales people and negotiating discounts do that. But they haven't let those sales people shut down / mess up self serve, including options for discounts.

You can get pretty far with amazon's tiered pricing and savings plans / spot etc discounts.