Amazon has reduced pricing for Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) reserved instances running Linux/Unix, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and Rat Hat Enterprise Linux up to 27%. According to the official announcement by the company, the prices are being reduced for new EC2 Reserved Instances running Linux/UNIX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server by up to 27%. This reduction applies to the Standard (m1), Second-Generation Standard (m3), High-Memory (m2), and High-CPU (c1) instance families. More specifically, AWS will automatically provide customers with additional savings when they have more than $250,000 in active upfront Reserved Instance fees.
With this price reduction, Reserved Instances will provide savings of up to 65% in comparison to On-Demand instances. Here are the price decreases by instance family and Region:
These new prices apply to all three Reserved Instance models (Light, Medium, and Heavy Utilization) for purchases made on or after March 5, 2013. Amazon has recommended the review of usage once a month to determine if one should alter his/her Reserved Instance footprint by buying additional Reserved Instances or selling them on the AWS Reserved Instance Marketplace. “However, if you haven’t done it lately, now is the perfect opportunity to review your existing usage and determine if now is the right time to purchase new Reserved Instances.” says the official post by the company.
Here are some general guidelines to help you choose the most economical model:
- If your server is running less than 15% of the time, use an On-Demand instance.
- If your server is runninng 15% and 40% of the time, use a Light Utlization Reserved Instance.
- If your server is running 40% to 80% of the time, use a Medium Utilization Reserved Instance.
- If your server is running 80% to 100% of the time, use a Heavy Utilization Reserved Instance.
For more information, Click here. To learn more about this feature and other Amazon EC2 pricing options, please visit the Amazon EC2 Pricing and the Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Page.
