LAS VEGAS — After spending nearly two hours trying to impress the crowd with new LLMs, advanced AI chips and autonomous agents, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman showed that the fastest way to a developer’s heart isn’t a neural network. It’s a discount.
One of the loudest cheers was for the AWS re:Invent keynote Tuesday Database storage planA mundane but much-needed update that promises to reduce bills by up to 35% on database services like Aurora, RDS, and DynamoDB in exchange for a one-year commitment.
The response illustrated a familiar tension for cloud customers: Even as tech giants introduce increasingly sophisticated AI tools, many companies and developers still struggle with the fundamental challenge of managing costs for core services.
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The new savings plans solve the problem by offering flexibility that didn’t exist before, allowing developers to change database engines or move regions without losing their concessions.
“AWS Database Storage Plan: Six Years of Complaining Finally Pays Off,” is the title From the wonderfully sarcastic and reliably snarky Cory Quinn Last week on AWSWho specializes in reducing AWS bills as Chief Cloud Economist postage bill.
Quinn called the new one “better than it has any right to” because it covers a wider range of services than expected, but he pointed out several key flaws: plans are limited to one-year terms (meaning you can’t lock in big savings for three years), they exclude older instance generations, and they don’t apply to storage or backups.
He also noted the lack of EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) coverage, calling the inability to shift costs between computing and databases a missed opportunity for flexibility.
But database pricing wasn’t the only fundamental upgrade to get a big response. For example, the crowd also cheered loudly Lambda is a durable functionA feature that allows serverless code to pause and wait for long-running background tasks without failing.
Garman made the announcements as part of a new reinvention: a 10-minute sprint through 25 non-AI product launches, complete with an on-stage shot clock. The bit was a nod to the breadth of AWS and the fact that not everyone in the audience came for AI news.
He announces the database savings plan at the last second, as the clock ticks down to zero. And based on the way he set it up, Garman knew it was going to be a hit – describing it as “one last thing that I think you’re all going to love”.
Judging by the cheers, at least, he was right.