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Cloud Computing · Foundational

Reserved Instances (RI)

AWS billing discount (up to about 72 percent) for committing to a specific instance configuration for 1 or 3 years.

Definition

Reserved Instances are a billing construct applied to matching usage. Standard RIs give the largest discount; Convertible RIs allow exchanging instance attributes for a smaller discount. Payment options are all upfront, partial upfront and no upfront, and zonal RIs also reserve capacity in a specific AZ. Similar reservations exist for RDS, ElastiCache, Redshift and others.

Example

A production database server running 24x7 is covered by a 3-year all-upfront Standard RI.

Exam tip

For EC2, AWS now generally recommends Savings Plans over RIs, but RIs remain the reservation mechanism for RDS and other databases.

Related terms