Amazon EC2 Convertible Reserved Instances and the Reserved Instance Regional Benefit

Standard Reserved Instances (“RIs”) have been available for 8 years, and provide customers the option to commit to use a specific instance size in an instance family in an availability zone (“AZ”) for either one or three years in exchange for our largest discount off On-Demand prices (~40-60% on average).

Today, we’re announcing two new improvements to our Reserved Instances.

First, your RIs can automatically apply to your instances even when they are running in different AZs in a region. Until today, RIs have provided customers both a capacity reservation and significant discount. Many customers have told us is that they primarily care about the discount, and would waive the capacity reservation for more discount flexibility. Now, RI customers can choose to waive the capacity reservation, run their instance in any AZ in the Region, and have their RI discount automatically applied. This means that customers no longer have to worry about launching their instances in the right AZ to match their RIs, but can focus more on the needs of their application. The regional benefit is available for all RIs and is offered at no additional cost.

Second, we’re introducing a new RI type called Convertible RIs. Convertible RIs provide customers with additional RI flexibility for still a very significant discount (~45% on average). With Convertible RIs, customers now have the option at any time to change the instance family, OS, or tenancy associated with their RI. Via the EC2 Console or APIs, customers simply indicate what change they want to make, and the change is made as long as the exchange is for an equal or greater spend on the new Convertible RIs.

Convertible RIs and the regional benefit are available in all public AWS Regions, excluding AWS GovCloud (US) and AWS China (Beijing), which are coming soon.