Additional Reserved Instance Options for Amazon RDS

Hot on the heels of our announcement of Additional Reserved Instance Options for Amazon EC2, I would like to tell you about a similar option for the Amazon Relational Database Service.

We have added Light and Heavy Utilization Reserved Instances for the MySQL and Oracle database engines. You can save 30% to 55% of your On-Demand DB Instance costs, depending on your usage.

Light Utilization Reserved Instances offer the lowers upfront payment, and ideal for DB instances that are used sporadically for development and testing, or for short-term projects. You can save up to 30% on a 1-year term and 35% on a 3-year term when compared to the same instance on an On-Demand basis.

Medium Utilization Reserved Instances have a higher upfront payment than Light Utilization Reserved Instances, but a much lower hourly usage fee.  They are suitable for workloads that run most of the time, with some variability in usage. Savings range up to 35% for a 1-year term and 48% for a 3-year term when compared to On-Demand. These are the same Reserved Instances that we have offered since August 2010.

Heavy Utilization Reserved Instances are the best value for steady-state production database instances that are destinated to be running 24×7. With this type of Reserved Instance you pay an upfront fee and a low hourly rate for every hour of the one or three year term. You can save 41% for a 1-year term and 55% for a 3-year term.

These Reserved Instance offerings allow you to optimize your costs depending on your workload. The table below shows which Amazon RDS offerings you can use to lower your RDS costs. For example, if you need a DB instance for 5 months, a Light Utilization Reserved Instance will provide you the lowest effective cost.

Learn more about this feature and other RDS pricing options on the Amazon RDS pricing page.

As always, we enjoy lowering our prices so that AWS becomes an even better value for you.

— Jeff;