Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances

Why Should I Use Reserved Instances?

Reserved Instances provide you with a significant discount (up to 75%) compared to On-Demand instance pricing.

Reserved Instances provide a capacity reservation so that you can have confidence in your ability to launch the number of instances you have reserved when you need them.

You have the flexibility to pay all, part, or nothing upfront. The more you pay up front, the more you save. If your requirements change, you can modify or sell your Reserved Instance.

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The Reserved Instance hourly rate is applied to your Amazon EC2 instance usage when the attributes of your instance usage match the attributes of your Reserved Instances.

With Reserved Instances, you can choose the type of capacity reservation that best fits your application needs.

• Standard Reserved Instances: These instances are available to launch any time, 24 hours/day x 7 days/week. This option provides the most flexibility to run the number of instances you have reserved whenever you need them, including steady state workloads.
• Scheduled Reserved Instances: These instances are available to launch within the time windows you reserve. This option allows you to match your capacity reservation to a predictable recurring schedule that only requires a fraction of a day, a week, or a month. For example, if you have a predictable workload such as a monthly financial risk analysis, you can schedule it to run on the first five days of the month. Another example would be scheduling nightly bill processing from 4pm-12am each weekday.

• Instance type: Instance types comprise varying combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity. For example, m3.xlarge.
• Availability Zone: Amazon EC2 provides you the ability to purchase Reserved Instances within AWS Availability Zones. For example, us-east-1a.
• Platform description: Reserved Instances can be purchased for Amazon EC2 running Linux/UNIX, SUSE Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Microsoft Windows Server, and Microsoft SQL Server platforms.
• Tenancy: Each instance that you launch has a tenancy attribute. Generally, instances run with a default tenancy (running on multi-tenant hardware) unless you’ve explicitly specified to run your instance with a tenancy of dedicated (single tenant hardware) or host (dedicated physical server).

Standard Reserved Instances

• Term: AWS offers Reserved Instances for 1 or 3 year terms. Reserved Instance Marketplace sellers also offer Reserved Instances often with shorter terms.
• Payment Option: You can choose between 3 payment options: All Upfront, Partial Upfront, and No Upfront. If you choose the Partial or No Upfront payment option, the remaining balance will be due in monthly increments over the term.

Scheduled Reserved Instances

• Term: Scheduled Reserved Instances have a 1 year term commitment.
• Payment Option: Scheduled Reserved Instances accrue charges hourly, billed in monthly increments over the term.

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Visit the Amazon EC2 Pricing page to view the Reserved Instance prices sold by AWS and volume discounts.

If you purchase a large number of Reserved Instances in an AWS region, you will automatically receive discounts on your upfront fees and hourly fees for future purchases of Reserved Instances in that AWS region.

Reserved Instances are sold by third-party sellers on the Reserved Instance Marketplace, who occasionally offer even deeper discounts at shorter terms.

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Reserved Instance Marketplace allows other AWS customers to list their Reserved Instances for sale. Third-party Reserved Instances are often listed at lower prices and shorter terms. These Reserved Instances are no different to Reserved Instances purchased directly from AWS. To learn more about how to buy a Reserved Instance from AWS or from third-party sellers, visit the Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances Getting Started page.

To learn more about selling your Reserved Instances on the Reserved Instance Marketplace, visit the Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Marketplace page.

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Visit the Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Getting Started page to learn more about how to purchase the right Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance.