I can't even leave my neighborhood without getting feature requests! My neighbor Rick was walking his dog past my house and stopped to ask me when we were going to support Reserved Instances for Amazon RDS. Such is life in the Pacific Northwest part of the US.
Hey Rick, we've got your RDS Reserved Instances ready now. You can get a lower price and know that an instance has been reserved for your use.
After you make a low, one-time payment, you can use a DB Instance at an hourly rate that is significantly lower than the On-Demand pricing for the same instance class. This will result in a decrease in AWS charges for any application that requires full-time access to a relational database.
When you purchase an RDS Reserved DB Instance, you choose a specific AWS Region and instance class. You do not need to choose an Availability Zone. You can purchase up to 20 Reserved DB instances. If you need more DB Instances, you need to complete the Amazon RDS DB Instance request form. You cannot move a reservation from one Region to another and they always apply to a particular DB instance class, so make your purchase with care.
You can make your purchase using the RDS APIs, or the RDS command-line tools. Here are the commands:
- rds-describe-reserved-db-instances - Returns the list of DB Instance reservations for your account or details for one of your reserved database instances.
- rds-describe-reserved-db-instances-offerings - Returns the list of DB Instance offerings that are available for purchase.
- rds-purchase-reserved-db-instances-offering - Purchases one or more reserved DB Instances.
The one-time fee starts at $227.50 for a Small DB Instance with a one-year term.
-- Jeff;
PS - Clean up after your dog, Rick.
Are reserved instances upgradeable? For example if we buy a small reserved instance then want to upgrade to a larger size is there an upgrade path or do we get stuck with the now unused smaller instance.
Posted by: John Pettitt | August 19, 2010 at 12:38 PM