From InfoWorld: Customers who have Reserved Instance contracts with Amazon Web Services will be able to subdivide some of their Linux and Unix virtual machine instances while maintaining their capacity discounts, thanks to pricing changes announced Monday.
Reserved Instances allow customers to lock themselves into paying AWS for a certain amount of compute capacity with the company's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) in exchange for a discount off its list price.
Under the new scheme, a customer could pay for a c4.8xlarge Regional Reserved Instance, and use that payment to run one c4.4xlarge and two c4.2xlarge virtual machines in one region instead of one massive VM. That's a change from the past, when Amazon's standard Reserved Instances locked customers into a particular virtual machine type.
In addition, customers that under-provision their Regional RIs can maintain their reserved instance discounts as they scale up. That means customers with c4.4xlarge reservations will end up only paying half of the on-demand price on top of the reserved instance price if they scale it up to a c4.8xlarge instance.
That's designed to be particularly useful for customers dealing with workloads that see spikes in demand (like retailers on Black Friday). They still get the reserved instance discounts but can maintain the scale-up flexibility that on-demand customers get.
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