Amazon EC2 Now Offers Reserved Instance Modification for Instance Type
We are excited to announce the ability to modify the instance type of Linux/UNIX Reserved Instances (RIs) within an instance family.
RIs allow you to make a low, one-time payment to reserve compute capacity for a one- or three-year term and receive a significant discount on the hourly compute charges. Prior to the introduction of this feature you could not change the instance type of an RI. Now if you have a Linux/UNIX RI and capacity is available, you can change the instance type of your reservation to a larger or smaller type in the same family. For example, if you have a Linux/UNIX RI covering eight m1.smalls and want to migrate your application to a larger instance type in the M1 family, you can still get the pricing benefit of your RI by modifying it to cover four m1.mediums. There is no additional cost for instance type modification.
To learn more about how instance type modification works, please refer to the RI user guide. To get started modifying your RIs, please go to the Reserved Instances page of the EC2 Management Console.