One of my reserved instance is about to expire in near futre.
I'd like to buy the reserved plan for the instance
(I'm not planning to run 2 such instances at the same time)
I just want to extend the reserved period if it makes sense.
How do I do that?
feels like this might be very good fit for stackoverflow, please let me know if there's a better qna site for this.
From Learn How to Renew an EC2 Reserved Instance:
You can queue your Reserved Instance purchases for a specific date and time in the future. To renew your EC2 RI automatically, you can queue an RI purchase for the date and time that your existing RI expires. On the scheduled date and time, AWS automatically purchases the RI for you using your account's default payment method.
Before renewing, I would suggest you also consider AWS Savings Plans, which are more flexible than Reserved Instances. Also, consider whether you want a 1-year term or a 3-year term and, for RIs, whether it is Zonal or Regional.
Related
ECS (EC2 Container Service) works with Auto Scaling Groups. But is it possible to use ECS with Reserved Instances? I ask this because Reserved Instances are cheaper.
When you reserve an instance, you get billed for all possible hours of use for the reservation period at the beginning of the period, whether you use the hours or not. At the end of the billing period, AWS will reconcile your usage hours vs. reserved hours.
This means that regardless of whether you stopped or started the instance automatically, you're still paying for it, albeit at the lower reserved price. Reserved instances do make sense for the 'non-elastic' portion of your ASG, like instance 1 of 3 that always needs to be up. If you have a lot of the same instance type, you can also 'float' reserved instance hours by estimating capacity and making your best guess as to how many auto-scaled hours you will end up needing.
This approach is good if you have an established track record of use, like peak load between 7AM and 5PM PST. You can do the math from there.
My preference for elasticity in ECS is to use the spot market. You will pay much much much less for them and autoscaling works great.
I have little query related to reserved c3.large going to 1 year and it was reserved for 1 year does it will renew automatically or i need to do it manually.
If yes please advise how i can do it.
You don't actually 'renew' a reserved instance - you buy another one. Remember a reserved instance is just a billing construct and has nothing to do with any particular instance that may or may not be running.
So when the term of the reserved instance runs out, any instances you have simply start getting billed at the on-demand rate, unless and until you purchase another reserved instance.
You have to do it manually. From: Reserved Instances
Reserved instances do not renew automatically; you can continue using the EC2 instance without interruption, but you will be charged
On-Demand rates.
The other answers here are correct, but for my use case the easiest thing was to let the instance expire and then "Purchase More Like These". See details here.
I am trying to understand Amazon EC2 reserved instances pricing structure. It is my understanding that the Reserved Instances are no more than a different pricing for my instances.
My question is what happens if I pay upfront for an instance and later for whatever reason I need to terminate it before all of the period of the instance is completed? Can I use the remaining money paid on another instance or that is gone?
Any clarification will be appreciated,
Thanks!
Yes, when you pay for a reserved instance, you will be billed wether you use it or not, and you could theoretically terminate and create a new instance ever day (week, month, hour etc), and still only pay for the single instance that you previously agreed to pay for, for the term you agreed to pay.
Its a bit tricky, but you need to wrap your mind around the fact that a Reserved Instance is a billing construct only - it has nothing to do with any particular instance you may have running. Paying upfront gives you the right to run an instance, at a pre-agreed for price.
If you buy a single RI, and then spinup 2 of them, one will automatically get 'billed' under the RI contract you have, the other will be billed at an On Demand hourly rate. If you delete one of them (either of them), the hourly on demand billing goes away and you continue to get billed on the RI only.
Also, if you decide you are never going to need the RI you terminated you can sell (thru amazon) the unused portion of your RI if you find you no longer need it; I get most of my reserved instances this way and you can usually save a bit of money (as the buyer), and recoup some of your losses as the seller.
We’ve purchased an Amazon Web Services (AWS) reserved instance for an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance that is critical to our infrastructure. This instance starts and stops every day at certain time interval.
I see that purchasing a reserved instance 'guarantees' that this instance will reliably start even when AWS is under heavy load, but is there any way to specifically tie this reserved instance to the instance we want to associate with it?
What happens if we add another instance that matches the exact criteria of the reserved instance we’ve purchased?
You don't need to worry or do anything in associating the instance and the purchased Reserved Instance; all those are done automatically by AWS.
The reserved Instance is purely a billing and cost related and it doesn't relate to the technology aspect of an EC2 instance. If any of your running instance matches with any of your purchased Reserved Instance then you benefit from the reduced costing. There isn't any commitment on the SLA or changes at the Instance level which involves Reserved Instance. The same case works when you have 2 reserved instances; if there 2 instances running in your account which matches your reserved instance purchase they the reduced cost would be applied.
Analogy - Super Market Coupon Offer
If the Offer Says, buy 2 units of Product A and get one Product B
absolutely Free. So you look into the offer and take 2 units of
Product A and one Unit of Product B. During the billing as well, the
Point of Sales Person also doesn't look into each and every product
and try to check it offers; rather he or she directly keeps scaning
each and every product against the bar-code scanner and that't it -
when these 3 are scanned, the price for Free-Product is automatically
reversed.
So similarly, you buy the Reserved Instance (Coupon) choosing the AMI,
Region, AZ, Duration etc. You would do all your tech stuff as usual
like deploying, patching, monitoring etc. During the billing, if the
instance(s) you launched matches the Reserved Instance, then the
Reserved pricing would be applied; if not that would be charged at
'On-Demand-Pricing'.
If there is a mismatch between what instance you are running and what instance you have reserved; you will not be using the benefit of Reserved-Instance pricing
and be charged with On-Demand-Pricing. Also you will be wasting the
investment done for the Reserved-Instance
As implied in Naveen's answer, there is no direct way to associate an instance with a reservation.
If you want the reliability, then you must launch instances with unique set of properties (instance type, az and AMI). There is no other way at the moment.
This is supposed to be a comment in Naveen's reply. But as I had no reputation yet to commen, I am adding it as an answer.
I have a micro instance of EC2 that I am currently paying for using pay-as-you-go. I am thinking about transferring this instance to a reserved instance (upfront fee + lower hourly charge). I read through the documentation here, but am still unclear about a couple of things.
First, will I be able to seamlessley 'transfer' my current pay-as-you-go instance onto the reserved instance platform without having to move my snapshot onto a new server? Also, does the 'Reserved Instance Type' only refer to the down payment + hourly rate options you have and not have anything to do with the actual performance of the box? From what I've read, I should choose the 'Heavy Utilization' option since the box will be running a site that is up 24/7.
You do not have to move your server or make any change when buying a reserved instance. You simply need to select an RI that is the same size and in the same region and availability zone as your current system. Heavy utilization is the best choice for you if your system runs 24/7. If you don't think you'll need it for a full year, consider buying from the marketplace where you may be able to buy in some increment lower than 1 year.
Reserved instances are just a billing feature. All you need to do is create a reservation that matches the parameters of your current instance.
It breaks down like this:
You just purchase an RI, and if it happens to match a running instance (same Region, Zone and Instance Type), you get a discount when running the instance.
Multiple RIs will match multiple instances.
If you're not running a "matching" instance, you don't get a discount.
The RI type (Heavy/Medium/Light) is just a trade-off on up-front cost vs discount cost. If you're running 24x7, get the heavy, it will save you the most money. If you don't want to invest a lot now, you can get the light and pay a little more, but loose less if you stop your instance.