Reserved Instances have been a part of the AWS pricing model for quite some time. You can reserve an instance and receive a significant discount, along with a capacity reservation, when you purchase a Reserved Instance (RI).

You don’t need to make any code or administrative changes in order to benefit from Reserved Instances. We’ll automatically apply Reserved Instance rates first when we compute your bill in order to minimize your costs.

New Payment Options

We are simplifying the Reserved Instance options that are available to users of Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). The new model is payment-based and provides a single type of Reserved Instance, with three payment options:

No Upfront – No upfront payment is required. This option provides a substantial discount (typically about 30%) over the one year term of the RI when compared to On-Demand.

– No upfront payment is required. This option provides a substantial discount (typically about 30%) over the one year term of the RI when compared to On-Demand. Partial Upfront – With a balance of payments between upfront and hourly, this option replaces the previous Heavy Utilization RI and provides a high discount (typically about 60% for a three year term) over the course of a one or three year term.

– With a balance of payments between upfront and hourly, this option replaces the previous Heavy Utilization RI and provides a high discount (typically about 60% for a three year term) over the course of a one or three year term. All Upfront – This option allows you to pay for the entire RI term (one or three years) with one upfront payment, and provides the best discount (typically about 63% for a three year term).

Purchase Now

These options are available for all of the database engines supported by RDS (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and SQL Server) in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and South America (São Paulo) regions. They are not available for SQL Server License Included.

As part of this simplification, you will no longer be able to purchase the Light or Medium Utilization Reserved Instances on or after August 15, 2015.

More Info

For complete information on these new cost-saving options, please take a look at the RDS Pricing page.

— Jeff;