Amazon Web Services Introduces Reserved Instances

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For the past three years, Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), has helped businesses ranging from startups to large enterprises pay for only the compute and storage capacity they actually consume. Today, AWS is introducing Reserved Instances, an additional pricing option for Amazon EC2 that extends the current On-Demand pay-as-you-go pricing by giving customers an option to make a low, one-time payment to reserve capacity and further reduce hourly usage charges. As with On-Demand Instances, customers will still pay only for the compute capacity that they actually consume, and if they do not use an instance, they will not pay usage charges for it. To sign up for Amazon EC2, Reserved Instances

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Customers of all sizes enjoy the pay-as-you-go flexibility of Amazon EC2, but many have told us they are ready to reserve capacity in order to achieve even lower costs,” said Peter De Santis, General Manager of Amazon EC2. “Now customers can choose to reserve capacity as if they owned the hardware, but unlike traditional infrastructure, with Reserved Instances, customers do not pay to maintain and operate idle hardware, and instead pay usage charges only when actually utilizing the instances.”

Reserved Instances are complementary to existing On-Demand Instances and give businesses even more flexibility to reduce computing costs. Customers make a low, one-time payment for each instance they want to reserve and in turn receive a significant discount on the hourly usage charge for that instance.

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After the one-time payment, the instance is reserved and there is no further obligation; customers only pay for the compute capacity that they consume, and if they do not use an instance, they will not pay usage charges on it. Because Reserved Instances function identically to existing On-Demand Instances, customers can now plan for an anticipated amount of capacity using Reserved Instances and then instantly spin up On-Demand Instances if their compute needs exceed their reserved capacity. Of course, customers can also choose to handle all of their capacity needs using only On-Demand instances or only Reserved Instances—it’s entirely up to each customer. Reserved Instances are available in 1-year or 3-year terms.

"AWS's pricing and delivery model allowed us to launch quickly knowing we had the flexibility to scale our infrastructure as needed. We started with one small EC2 instance, and now at peak loads have up to 25 large instances. With the introduction of 'Reserved Instances.

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we can be confident that AWS remains the best infrastructure choice for us, even for parts of our service where load is predictable,” Amir Nathoo, Co-founder of WebMynd Corporation, a company providing personalized search applications.

ShareThis is the sharing network that makes it simple to send any online content quickly. “At ShareThis, we run our entire online operation on Amazon EC2. That includes consumer web sharing service, a multi-terabyte data warehouse, publisher analytics, and our entire development/testing environment,” said Nanda Kishore, Chief Technology Officer at ShareThis. “By moving many of our instances to EC2 Reserved Instances, we’ve saved 40% of our usage costs!”

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Many enterprise customers are able to determine predictable minimum levels of usage for their cloud computing needs. Oracle Database development in the cloud is good example," said Robert Shimp, Group Vice President, Technology & Architecture at Oracle. "With Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances, customers can pay an up-front charge and obtain better pricing from Amazon for the EC2 capacity needed to develop Oracle Database applications. But just as with the rest of AWS, if their needs spike when they move to application testing, they retain the flexibility to grow usage of Amazon EC2 compute resources along with it."