Announcing Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances for Recurring Schedules

You can now purchase Amazon EC2 Scheduled Reserved Instances for applications that run on a part-time basis. 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.

Starting today, the new Scheduled Reserved Instances option allows you to reserve capacity on recurring daily, weekly, and monthly schedules. For example, you can purchase a daily reservation such as midnight to 6am every day, a weekly reservation such as 8am-5pm every weekday, or a monthly reservation such as the first five days of each month.

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

• Standard Reserved Instances: The instances you reserved are available to launch any time, 24 hours/day x 7 days/week. This option provides the most flexibility to run instances whenever you need them, including steady state workloads.
• Scheduled Reserved Instances: Instances are available to launch within the time windows you reserved. This option allows you to match your capacity reservation to a predictable recurring schedule.

Scheduled Reserved Instances are available for one-year terms at 5-10% below On-Demand rates, in the US-East (Virginia), US-West (Oregon), and EU-West (Ireland) regions for C3, C4, M4, and R3 instance types. Support for additional regions and instance types will be added the future.

To get started, simply log in to the AWS Management Console, enter your schedule requirements, and then purchase your reservation. Then, when your scheduled time window opens, you can launch your instances using the console, AWS SDKs, or command-line tools.

To learn more, visit AWS Official Blog or Scheduled Reserved Instances in the Amazon EC2 user guide.