AWS Savings Plans for a Magento 2 store

AWS Savings Plans helped cut a Magento 2 store’s AWS bill from $291.75 to $178.53 a month before tax. That is 38.8% less, or $1,358.64 a year before tax. The figures compare the July 2024 and July 2026 bills. A 1-year Compute Savings Plan now covers almost all compute, and a reserved RDS instance covers the database. Moving OpenSearch and Redis onto one k3s node removed a managed service and made the compute steady enough to commit to.

The client

The client runs one Magento 2 store with about 6,000 configurable and 50,000 simple products. The store runs on AWS with RDS for the database and S3 with CloudFront for media.

The problem

In July 2024 the store paid $291.75 a month before tax. The bill showed three problems.

• Most compute ran at On-Demand prices. The Savings Plan cost $67.70 a month, while On-Demand EC2 cost $90.76 on top of it. More than half of the compute spend carried no discount.
• The search engine had its own bill. The managed OpenSearch Service cost $64.11 a month on its own.
• The database paid full price. RDS cost $50.89 a month with no reservation.

What we did

Fewer services to commit to

A Savings Plan only pays off on usage that runs every hour. The old setup spread compute across EC2 instances and a managed OpenSearch domain. We moved Magento, OpenSearch and Redis onto a single k3s node. The OpenSearch Service line left the bill, and the compute became one steady node.

The architecture change has its own write-up in how much Magento 2 costs on AWS.

A Compute Savings Plan sized to the node

We picked a 1-year Compute Savings Plan with no upfront payment. A Compute Savings Plan applies to any instance family and region. The k3s node runs on a different instance family than the old servers, so the commitment had to follow the store across families. An EC2 Instance Savings Plan gives a larger discount and covers any size within one family in one region. It would not have covered the new node.

The commitment grew from $67.70 to $122.02 a month to cover the larger node. We sized it to the compute the store runs every hour of the month. Usage above the commitment bills at On-Demand prices, and you still pay for any commitment you leave unused.

A reserved instance for RDS

Savings Plans do not cover RDS. The database is steady, so it moved to a reserved RDS instance. The RDS line fell from $50.89 to $31.14 a month.

The result

Before tax, per month:

• The bill fell 38.8%. $291.75 became $178.53 a month, which saves $1,358.64 a year before tax. With tax, the bill went from $358.84 to $219.59 a month.
• Compute is almost all discounted. On-Demand EC2 fell from 57% of compute spend to 6%.
• Compute costs less overall. EC2 plus the Savings Plan fell from $158.46 to $129.95 a month, while the node also took over OpenSearch and Redis.
• The database costs 39% less. The reserved instance cut RDS by $19.75 a month.

Check your own AWS bill

Open your bill and look at the On-Demand EC2 line next to the Savings Plans line. A large On-Demand line on steady servers is money a commitment can save. To review your store’s bill with us, tell us about your store.