Saving Money with Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances

Are you or your company using Amazon EC2 instances? Are you using Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances yet? Reserved Instances are often one of the easiest and most effective ways to save money on your Amazon EC2 bill. They can allow you to significantly reduce the price you pay for Amazon EC2 instance hours over a one or three year period compared to on-demand rates. Many customers using Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances are saving lots of money, and we’d love to see more customers using them!

Reserved Instances got even more attractive recently, with an API update that allows you to modify the details of your Reserved Instances. Until this release, the Availability Zone you specified at the time of purchase remained fixed for the duration of the term of the Reserved Instances. This release gives you the ability to migrate your Reserved Instances to a different Availability Zone within the same region, making Reserved Instances even more flexible.

You can modify your Reserved Instances through the AWS Management Console, or you can use one of the AWS SDKs to pragmatically modify them:

AmazonEC2Client ec2 = new AmazonEC2Client(...);
ReservedInstancesConfiguration configuration = new ReservedInstancesConfiguration()
     .withPlatform("EC2-VPC")
     .withAvailabilityZone("us-east-1b")
     .withInstanceCount(1);              
ModifyReservedInstanceRequest request = new ModifyReservedInstancesRequest()
     .withReservedInstancesIds(myReservedInstancesId);
     .withTargetConfigurations(configuration);
ec2.modifyReservedInstances(request);