New Simplified Reserved Instances Payment Options for Amazon RDS

Posted on: Jun 15, 2015

You can now take advantage of the new Reserved Instances (RI) payment options on Amazon RDS. This simpler payment-based model consolidates reserved instances into one RI type, while introducing three payment options: No Upfront, Partial Upfront and All Upfront RIs, offering you more flexibility to decide on how you would like to pay for your Reserved Instances.

The No Upfront payment option does not require an upfront payment and provides a substantial discount (typically about 30%) compared to On-Demand. This option is offered with a one-year term. The Partial Upfront payment option balances the payments of an RI between upfront and hourly, and replaces the previous Heavy Utilization RI. You pay for a portion of the Reserved Instances upfront, and then pay for the remainder over the course of the one- or three-year term. This option provides a high discount (typically about 60% for a 3 year term) compared to On-Demand. The All Upfront payment option allows you to pay for the entire Reserved Instances term (one- or three-year) with one upfront payment and benefit from the largest discount (typically about 63% for a 3 year term) compared to On-Demand.

Amazon RDS supports these new payment options on all RDS supported engines including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and SQL Server, except for the SQL Server-License Included, in the following regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and South America (Sao Paulo). Effective August 15th, 2015, RDS will no longer offer new Light and Medium Utilization RIs. If you already own RIs, the availability of these new payment options will not affect any RIs that you have already purchased. For more information on these new cost saving options, please visit the RDS pricing page.