Thank goodness for this. I buy a lot of reserved instances in our company to cater for growth and client projects, and often times I'll have an inventory of micro instances on standby when we need a couple of small or medium ones for a short term project. I am happy to purchase excess small/medium reserved instances if we can back port that computing power to multiple smaller instances.<p>One more thing - can you make it easier for International customers (I am in Australia) to on sell instances that are surplus to needs on the marketplace? I found out too late that there is a requirement for a US Bank account in order to sell spare or unused reserved instances, which is a PITA and affects our long term planning.
This automates a bit of the manual work of resizing, which is good. GCE still has a better model here where the longer you run an instance the cheaper it gets, and they do per minute billing as well.
Maybe I'm missing something .. what's to stop me from buying reserved instances for the smallest instance within a class and then assigning these to the largest instances in a class?
This help my life a lot. Buying RIs monthly give us a huge savings, but was a huge headache.<p>First with Regional RIs I no longer have to worry about AZ and modifying RIs, now I don't worry about RI modification to have right size.
Is this seriously how complicated pricing is with "cloud" now? None of that made any sense to me.<p>I pay $400/month for a half rack at a datacenter. Its regional RIs also provide instance size flexibility in addition to AZ flexibility so you no longer have to worry about being tied to a specific size or AZ, or worry about launching the right instance size in the right AZ to match their RIs... or something. $400/month.
Disclaimer: I run a consulting company that fixes horrifying AWS bills.<p>By and large, this is going to make life a lot easier for most of my clients.<p>That said:<p>* You still have to watch out for generational changes ("Oh, you have a lot of reservations for i2 instances? That sucks, i3s just came out, are a third cheaper, and you can't use your RIs for them."), so 1 year is still where it's at unless you're doing something like writing your cloud spend as CapEx.<p>* You still need to figure out how your application profiles. Converting an m4 reservation to a c3 isn't happening.<p>* Smaller instance reservations apply to larger instances, and pro-rate the difference down to on-demand pricing. This is "the right thing," but it's going to make Amazon's already byzantine billing even harder to dissect.