The days of worrying about not able to convert machines of different configuration when on AWS EC2 Reserved Instances (RIs) and the DevOps team panicking about the wrong AZ allocation are gone! AWS today announced Convertible EC2 RI and Regional Benefit, which will benefit enterprises looking for capacity assurance and flexibility on all their current EC2 instance types on a three-year term. In this two-part series we will walk you through the two new announcements where EC2 RIs are now convertible and AZ agnostic.
The sneak peek :
Convertible EC2 Reserved Instances
This is indeed a good news, as the EC2 Reserved Instances ecosystem is now more flexible. As the name says, Convertible RIs help users buy new category of RI featuring exciting new flexibility options, which can provide up to 45% savings over on-demand instances.
A lot of customers commit for RI for specified instance type depending on current usage but then suffer for not being able to utilize with capability like the other instance types due to change in their infra requirements. For instance, if you want a burstable performance requirement and opted for t2.large but would like to switch to more compute based c4.large, then this conversion type is possible now. This is all feasible in the new Convertible RI types wherein you can modify instance family, OS flavor as well as instance size, ultimately to reap maximum benefits.
Region Benefit — EC2 Reserved Instances goes AZ agnostic
Earlier you had to reserve RI into multiple AZ’s within a region, for the purpose of securing load balancing/ redundancy. However, unused RIs would be charged. Moreover, AWS allowed switching between AZ of same region under ‘Modify RI’ option, but in few cases these were chargeable.
With the announcement of new Region Benefit RI availability, enterprises can now be independent of AZ, thus becoming AZ- agnostic. However, there is an exception to this. When you opt for the Region Benefit feature, it doesn’t guarantee you the capacity, hence if you are betting on capacity then Region Benefit might not be an option for you. The best part is that you can modify existing RI’s for Region Benefit.
Already getting the feeling of fresh out of the box?
Watch out for this space. We will come up with complete details shortly. Especially the Convertible RIs seems very exciting and useful. We will see how you can make use of it. Also, very soon Botmetric’s RI Planner will be updated to take into consideration these two important updates on EC2 Reserved Instances.
