Category: Price Reduction

Amazon Kinesis is a managed service designed to handle real-time streaming of big data. It can accept any amount of data, from any number of sources, scaling up and down as needed (see my introductory post for more information on Kinesis). Developers can use the Kinesis Client Library (KCL) to simplify the implementation of apps that consume and process streamed data.

Today we are making the capture of streaming data with Kinesis even easier, with a powerful new Kinesis Producer Library, a big step up in the maximum record size, and a price reduction that makes capture of small-sized records even more cost-effective.

Let’s take a closer look!

Increased Record Size
A Kinesis record is simply a blob of data, also known as the payload. Kinesis does not look inside the data; it simply accepts the record (via PutRecord or PutRecords) from a producer and puts it into a stream.

We launched Kinesis with support records that could be as large as 50 KB. With today’s update we are raising this limit by a factor of 20; individual records can now be as large as 1 MB. This gives you a lot more flexibility and opens the door to some interesting new ways to use Kinesis. For example, you can now send larger log files, semi-structured documents, email messages, and other data types without having to split them in to small chunks.

Price Reduction for Put Calls
Up until now, pricing for Put operations was based on the number of records, with a charge of $0.028 for every million records.

Going forward, pricing for Put operations will be based on the size of the payload, as expressed in “payload units” of 25 KB. The charge will be $0.014 per million units. In other words, Putting small records (25 KB or less) now costs half as much as it did before. The vast majority of our customers use Kinesis in this way today and they’ll benefit from the price reduction.

For more information, take a look at the Kinesis Pricing page.

Kinesis Producer Library (KPL)
I’ve saved the biggest news for last!

You can use Kinesis to handle the data streaming needs of many different types of applications including websites (clickstream data), ad servers (publisher data), mobile apps (customer engagement data), and so forth.

In order to achieve high throughput, you should combine multiple records into a single call to PutRecords. You should also consider aggregating multiple user records into a single Kinesis record, and then de-aggregating them immediately prior to consumption. Finally, you will need code to detect and retry failed calls.

The new Kinesis Producer Library (KPL) will help you with all of the tasks that I identified above. It will allow you to write to one or more Kinesis streams with automatic and configurable retry logic; collect multiple records and write them in batch fashion using PutRecords; aggregate user records to increase payload size and throughput, and submit Amazon CloudWatch metrics (including throughput and error rates) on your behalf.

The KPL plays well with the Kinesis Client Library (KCL). The KCL takes care of many of the more complex tasks associated with consuming and processing streaming data in a distributed fashion, including load balancing across multiple instances, responding to instance failures, checkpointing processed records, and reacting to chances in sharding.

When the KCL receives an aggregated record with multiple KPL user records inside, it will automatically de-aggregate the records before making them available to the client application (you will need to upgrade to the newest version of the KCL in order to take advantage of this feature).

The KPL presents a Java API that is asynchronous and non-blocking; you simply hand records to it and receive a Future object in return Here’s a sample call to the addUserRecord method:

public void run() {
  ByteBuffer data = Utils.generateData(sequenceNumber.get(), DATA_SIZE);
  // TIMESTAMP is our partition key
  ListenableFuture f =
    producer.addUserRecord(STREAM_NAME, TIMESTAMP, Utils.randomExplicitHashKey(), data);
  Futures.addCallback(f, callback);
}

The core of the KPL takes the form of a C++ module; wrappers in other languages will be available soon.

KPL runs on Linux and OSX. Self-contained binaries are available for the Amazon Linux AMI, Ubuntu, RHEL, OSX, and OSX Server. Source code and unit tests are also available (note that the KCL and the KPL are made available in separate packages).

For more information, read about Developing Producers with KPL.

— Jeff;

I am happy to announce that we are reducing the rates for several types of AWS data transfers, effective December 1, 2014, as follows:

• Outbound Data Transfer – Pricing for data transfer from AWS to the Internet is now 6% to 43% lower, depending on the Region and the amount of data transferred per month.
• Data Transfer to CloudFront – Data transfer from AWS to Amazon CloudFront is now free of charge.
• Data Transfer from CloudFront – Pricing for data transfer out of CloudFront edge locations in the United States, Europe, Japan and Australia is now 4% to 29% lower, depending on the edge location and usage tier.

Price Reduction – Outbound Data Transfer
Here is a summary of the price reductions for outbound data transfer (See the EC2 pricing and S3 pricing pages for more information):

The prices for the first 10 TB/month take effect after the bandwidth provided as part of the AWS Free Tier has been consumed.

Price Reduction – Data Transfer from CloudFront
Here is a summary of the price reductions for outbound data transfer from CloudFront to different parts of the world (see the CloudFront pricing, pages for more information):

These prices take effect after the bandwidth provided as part of the AWS Free Tier has been consumed.

As I have noted in the past, we focus on driving down our costs over time. As we do this, we pass the savings along to you!

— Jeff;

I’ve got some good news for current and potential users of Amazon CloudSearch. As you may already know, CloudSearch is a a fully-managed service that makes it easy to setup, operate, and scale a search service for your website or application. If you use CloudSearch, you will benefit from a price reduction, additional language support, and control over domain partitioning (we released these features earlier this year but I didn’t have a chance to blog about them at that time). You can also take advantage of the recently released support for AWS CloudTrail.

Price Reduction
An ever-increasing number of AWS customers are adopting CloudSearch and we are scaling accordingly. We are reducing the hourly charge for CloudSearch by up to 50%, across all AWS Regions and search instance types. This change is effective as of November 1, 2014 and will take effect with no action on your part. With this change, the overall cost to run CloudSearch compares very favorably to the cost of setting up, running, and scaling your own search infrastructure.

Check out the CloudSearch Pricing page for more information.

Additional Language Support
Earlier this year we introduced language-specific text processing for Hebrew. With this addition, CloudSearch now supports a total of 34 languages. Here’s a search of some Hebrew-language content:

In mid-October we added support for custom tokenization dictionaries for Japanese. You can now control how CloudSearch tokenizes Japanese by adding a custom tokenization dictionary to the analysis scheme that you use for fields that contain Japanese-language text. To learn more, read about Customizing Japanese Tokenization in the CloudSearch Developer Guide.

Control Over Partitioning
If you are using the m2.2xlarge search instance type, you can now preconfigure the number of index partitions for your search domain. Preconfiguring a domain will improve the performance of large uploads. You can also add partitions to boost query performance by reducing the number of documents per partition. CloudSearch will still scale the domain up and down based on the volume of data and traffic, but the number of partitions will never drop below your desired partition count. You can exercise control over partitioning from the AWS Management Console, the CloudSearch APIs, or the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). You can set it when you create a search domain:

And you can update it later:

CloudTrail Support
Last month we added AWS CloudTrail support to CloudSearch. You can now use CloudTrail to get a history of the calls that are made to the CloudSearch API. The calls are recorded and delivered to an Amazon S3 bucket. To learn more, read about Logging Amazon CloudSearch Configuration Service Calls Using AWS CloudTrail.

— Jeff;

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable Domain Name Service (DNS), including a powerful Health Checking Service. Today we are extending Route 53 with support for domain name registration and management and Geo DNS. We are also reducing the price for Route 53 queries! Let’s take a closer look at each one of these items.

Domain Name Registration and Management
I registered my first domain name in 1995! Back then, just about every aspect of domain management and registration was difficult, expensive, and manual. After you found a good name, you had to convince one or two of your tech-savvy friends to host your DNS records, register the name using an email-based form, and then bring your site online. With the advent of web-based registration and multiple registrars the process became a lot smoother and more economical.

Up until now, you had to register your domain at an external registrar, create the Hosted Zone in Route 53, and then configure your domain’s entry at the registrar to point to the Route 53 name servers. With today’s launch of Route 53 Domain Name Registration, you can now take care of the entire process from within the AWS Management Console (API access is also available, of course). You can buy, manage, and transfer (both in and out) domains from a wide selection of generic and country-specific top-level domains (TLDs). As part of the registration process, we’ll automatically create and configure a Route 53 Hosted Zone for you. You can think up a good name, register it, and be online with static (Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)) or dynamic content (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), AWS Elastic Beanstalk, or AWS OpsWorks) in minutes.

If you, like many other AWS customers, own hundreds or thousands of domain names, you know first-hand how much effort goes in to watching for pending expirations and renewing your domain names. By transferring your domain to Route 53, you can take advantage of our configurable expiration notification and our optional auto-renewal. You can avoid embarrassing (and potentially expensive) mistakes and you can focus on your application instead of on your domain names. You can even reclaim the brain cells that once stored all of those user names and passwords.

Let’s walk through the process of finding and registering a domain name using the AWS Management Console and the Route 53 API.

The Route 53 Dashboard gives me a big-picture view of my Hosted Zones, Health Checks, and Domains:

I begin the registration process by entering the desired name and selecting a TLD from the menu:

The console checks on availability within the selected domain and in some other popular domains. I can add the names I want to the cart (.com and .info in this case):

Then I enter my contact details:

I can choose to enable privacy protection for my domain. This option will hide most of my personal information from the public Whois database in order to thwart scraping and spamming.

When everything is ready to go, I simply agree to the terms and my domain(s) will be registered:

I can see all of my domains in the console:

I can also see detailed information on a single domain:

I can also transfer domains into or out of Route 53:

As I mentioned earlier, I can also investigate, purchase, and manage domains through the Route 53 API. Let’s say that you are picking a name for a new arrival to your family and you want to make sure that you can acquire a suitable domain name (in most cases, consultation with your significant other is also advisable). Here’s some code to automate the entire process! I used the AWS SDK for PHP.

The first step is to set the desired last name and gender, and the list of acceptable TLDs:

$LastName = 'Barr';
$Gender   = 'F';
$TLDs     = array('.com', '.org');

Then I include the AWS SDK and the PHP Simple HTML DOM and create the Route 53 client object:

require 'aws.phar';
require 'simple_html_dom.php';

// Connect to Route 53
$Client = \Aws\Route53Domains\Route53DomainsClient::factory(array('region' => 'us-east-1'));

Now I need an array of the most popular baby names. I took this list and parsed the HTML to create a PHP array:

$HTML       = file_get_html("http://www.babycenter.com/top-baby-names-2013");
$FirstNames = array();

$Lists = $HTML->find('table tr ol');
$Items = $Lists[($Gender == 'F') ? 0 : 1];

foreach ($Items->find('li') as $Item)
{
  $FirstNames[] = $Item->find('a', 0)->innertext;
}

With the desired last name and the list of popular first names in hand (or in memory to be precise), I can generate interesting combinations and call the Route 53 checkDomainAvailability function to see if they are available:

foreach ($FirstNames as $FirstName)
{
  foreach ($TLDs as $TLD)
  {
    $DomainName = $FirstName . '-' . $LastName . $TLD;

    $Result = $Client->checkDomainAvailability(array(
      'DomainName'  => $DomainName,
      'IdnLangCode' => 'eng'));
  }
  echo "{$DomainName}: {$Result['Availability']}\n";
}

I could also choose to register the first available name (again, consultation with your significant other is recommended here). I’ll package up the contact information since I’ll need it a couple of times:

$ContactInfo = array(
  'ContactType'      => 'PERSON',
  'FirstName'        => 'Jeff',
  'LastName'         => 'Barr',
  'OrganizationName' => 'Amazon Web Services',
  'AddressLine1'     => 'XXXX  Xth Avenue',
  'City'             => 'Seattle',
  'State'            => 'WA',
  'CountryCode'      => 'US',
  'ZipCode'          => '98101',
  'PhoneNumber'      => '+1.206XXXXXXX',
  'Email'            => 'jbarr@amazon.com');

And then I use the registerDomain function to register the domain:

if ($Result['Availability'] === 'AVAILABLE')
{
  echo "Registering {$DomainName}\n");

  $Result = $Client->registerDomain(array(
    'DomainName'              => $DomainName,
    'IdnLangCode'             => 'eng',
    'AutoRenew'               => true,
    'DurationInYears'         => 1,
    'BillingContact'          => $ContactInfo,
    'RegistrantContact'       => $ContactInfo,
    'TechContact'             => $ContactInfo,
    'AdminContact'            => $ContactInfo,
    'OwnerPrivacyProtected'   => true,
    'AdminPrivacyProtected'   => true,
    'TechPrivacyProtected'    => true,
    'BillingPrivacyProtected' => true));
}

Geo Routing
Route 53’s new Geo Routing feature lets you choose the most appropriate AWS resource for content delivery based on the location where the DNS queries originate. You can now build applications that respond more efficiently to user requests, with responses that are wholly appropriate for the location. Each location (a continent, a country, or a US state) can be independently mapped to static or dynamic AWS resources. Some locations can receive static resources served from S3 while others receive dynamic resources from an application running on EC2 or Elastic Beanstalk.

You can use this feature in many different ways. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Global Applications – Route requests to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances hosted in an AWS Region that is in the same continent as the request. You could do this to maximize performance or to meet legal or regulatory requirements.
• Content Management – Provide users access with access to content that has been optimized, customized, licensed, or approved for their geographic location. For example, you could choose to use distinct content and resources for red and blue portions of the United States. Or, you could run a contest or promotion that is only valid in certain parts of world and use this feature to provide an initial level of filtering.
• Consistent Endpoints – Set up a mapping of locations to endpoints to ensure that a particular location always maps to the same endpoint. If you are running a MMOG, routing based on location can increase performance, reduce latency, give you better control over time-based scaling, and increase the likelihood that users with similar backgrounds and cultures will participate in the same shard of the game.

To make use of this feature, you simply create some Route 53 Record Sets that have the Routing Policy set to Geolocation. Think of each Record Set as a mapping from a DNS entry (e.g. www.jeff-barr.com) to a particular AWS resource an S3 bucket, an EC2 instance, or an Elastic Load Balancer. With today’s launch, each Record Set with a Geolocation policy becomes effective only when the incoming request for the DNS entry originates within the bounds (as determined by an IP to geo lookup) of a particular continent, country, or US state. The Record Sets form a hierarchy in the obvious way and the most specific one is always used. You can also choose to create a default entry that will be used if no other entries match.

You can set up this feature from the AWS Management Console, the Route 53 API, or the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). Depending on your application, you might want to think about an implementation that generates Record Sets based on information coming from a database of some sort.

Let’s say that I want to provide static content to most visitors to www.jeff-barr.com, and dynamic content to visitors from Asia. Here’s what I need to do. First I create a default Record Set for “www” that points to my S3 bucket:

Then I create another one “www”, this one Geolocated for Asia. This one points to an Elastic Load Balancer:

Price Reduction
Last, but certainly not least, I am happy to tell you that we have reduced the prices for Standard and LBR (Latency-Based Routing) queries by 20%. The following prices go in to effect as of August 1, 2014:

1. Standard Queries – $0.40 per million queries for the first billion queries per month; $0.20 per million queries after that.
2. LBR Queries – $0.60 per million queries for the first billion queries per month; $0.30 per million queries after that.
3. Geo DNS Queries – $0.70 per million queries for the first billion queries per month; $0.35 per million queries after that.

Available Now
These new features are available now and the price reduction goes in to effect tomorrow.

— Jeff;

PS – Thanks to Steve Nelson of AP42 for digging up the Internic Domain Registration Template!

It is always fun to write about price reductions. I enjoy knowing that our customers will find AWS to be an even better value over time as we work on their behalf to make AWS more and more cost-effective over time. If you’ve been reading this blog for an extended period of time you know that we reduce prices on our services from time to time, and todays announcement serves as the 42nd price reduction since 2008.

We’re more than happy to continue this tradition with our latest price reduction.

Effective April 1, 2014 we are reducing prices for Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, the Amazon Relational Database Service, and Elastic MapReduce.

Amazon EC2 Price Reductions
We are reducing prices for On-Demand instance as shown below. Note that these changes will automatically be applied to your AWS bill with no additional action required on your part.

We are reducing the prices for Reserved Instances as well for all new purchases. With todays announcement, you can save up to 45% with on a 1 year RI and 60% on a 3 year RI relative to the On-Demand price. Here are the details:

Also keep in mind that as you scale your footprint of EC2 Reserved Instances, that you will benefit from the Reserved Instance volume discount tiers, increasing your overall discount over On-Demand by up to 68%.

Consult the EC2 Price Reduction page for more information.

Amazon S3 Price Reductions
We are reducing prices for Standard and Reduced Redundancy Storage, by an average of 51%. The price reductions in the individual S3 pricing tiers range from 36% to 65%, as follows:

These prices are for the US Standard Region; consult the S3 Price Reduction page for more information on pricing in the other AWS Regions.

Amazon RDS Price Reductions
We are reducing prices for Amazon RDS DB Instances by an average of 28%. There’s more information on the RDS Price Reduction page, including pricing for Reserved Instances and Multi-AZ deployments of Amazon RDS.

Amazon ElastiCache Price Reductions
We are reducing prices for Amazon ElasticCache cache nodes by an average of 34%. Check out the ElastiCache Price Reduction page for more information.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce Price Reductions
We are reducing prices for Elastic MapReduce by 27% to 61%. Note that this is addition to the EC2 price reductions described above. Here are the details:

With this price reduction, you can now run a large Hadoop cluster using the hs1.8xlarge instance for less than $1000 per Terabyte per year (this includes both the EC2 and the Elastic MapReduce costs).

Consult the Elastic MapReduce Price Reduction page for more information.

We’ve often talked about the benefits that AWS’s scale and focus creates for our customers. Our ability to lower prices again now is an example of this principle at work.

It might be useful for you to remember that an added advantage of using AWS services such as Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 over using your own on-premises solution is that with AWS, the price reductions that we regularly roll out apply not only to any new storage that you might add but also to the existing data that you have already stored in AWS. With no action on your part, your cost to store existing data goes down over time.

Once again, all of these price reductions go in to effect on April 1, 2014 and will be applied automatically.

— Jeff;

I’ve got lots of great AWS news today! Here’s a summary:

• M3 instances are now available in two additional sizes.
• Several additional features are now available for newly launched M3 instances.
• Prices for S3 storage have been reduced by up to 22%.
• Prices for EBS Standard volume storage and I/O operations have been reduced by up to 50%.

Let’s take a closer look!

M3 Instance Type News
We announced the M3 instance type a little over a year ago. Our customers and our partners have found them to be very attractive. For example, a wide variety of top software is available to run on M3, with offerings such as aiScaler, Syncsort, Riak, NITRC available with 1-click deployment on AWS Marketplace

The M3 is our Second Generation General-purpose EC2 instance type. They have a balance of CPU power, RAM, and networking capacity that is suitable for a very wide variety of applications. Today we are making the M3 instance type even more useful, with support for two new instance sizes and some new features.

New Instance Sizes
We are adding medium and large M3 instances. Here’s the full lineup:

The M3 instances feature high frequency Intel Xeon E5-2670 (Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge) processors.

When compared to the venerable M1 instance type, the M3 instances offer higher clock frequencies, significantly improved memory performance, and SSD-based instance storage, all at a lower price. If you are currently using M1 instances, switching to M3 instances will provide your users with better and more consistent performance while also decreasing your AWS bill. We reduced the prices for the M3 instances late last year and they are now more cost-effective than the M1 instances.

SSD-Based Storage
As you can see from the table above, the M3’s now include fast, SSD-based instance storage. You can add instance storage for M3 instances by specifying block device mappings in the instance launch parameters.

Instance Store-Backed AMIs
M3 instances have always supported launching from EBS-backed AMIs. They now support the use of instance store-backed AMIs (previously known as S3-backed AMIs) as well. This will allow you to make use of older AMIs that have not been converted to the newer, EBS-backed format. To learn more about the two types of AMIs, read the EC2 Root Volume documentation.

The new sizes and features are available in all of the public AWS Regions. They are not yet available in AWS GovCloud (US); however, the original M3 instance sizes (m3.xlarge and m3.2xlarge) are already available in GovCloud.

S3 Price Reduction
We are reducing the price for Amazon S3 storage in all Regions by up to 22%, with a proportionate reduction in the price of Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS). Here are the new prices for Standard Storage in the US Standard Region (see the New S3 Pricing page for more information):

The new pricing take effect on February 1, 2014 and will be applied automatically.

EBS Price Reduction
We are reducing prices for Elastic Block Store (EBS) Standard volume storage and I/O requests across all AWS Regions. The reductions vary by Region, and are as high as 50% in some locations. Here’s the new pricing in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region:

Again, the new pricing takes effect on February 1, 2014 and will be applied automatically. See the New EBS Pricing page for additional information.

— Jeff;

I am happy to announce a reduction in the On Demand and Reserved Instance (RI) prices for EC2’s HI1 (First Generation High I/O Performance) instances in select AWS regions, effective December 1, 2013, along with availability in the form of Spot Instances

The HI1 instances feature 16 vCPUs (Virtual CPUs), 60.5 GiB of RAM, 2 TB of SSD-backed instance storage, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, including support for cluster placement groups. You can learn more about them in the blog post that I wrote when we launched this instance type late last year.

Price Reduction
The On Demand prices for Linux and Windows instances have been reduced by 10% for HI1 instances in EU (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo).This change takes effect on December 1, 2013.

We are also reducing Reserved Instance (RI) pricing for HI1 – Linux and Windows instances by 10% for HI1 instances in EU (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). New Reserved Instance prices will only apply to Reserved Instances purchases made on or after December 1.

Spot Instances
You can now bid for HI1 instances on the Spot market in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland)  and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions.

— Jeff;

I am happy to announce that we are reducing the On-Demand and Reserved Instance prices for Amazon EC2’s M3 (Second Generation Standard) instances, effective November 1.

We are lowering the On-Demand prices of M3 instances by 10%. Regardless of which region you are running M3 instances in, these price reductions will automatically be reflected in your AWS charges.

Here are the new and old On-Demand prices in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region. See the EC2 Pricing page for prices in the other Regions:

We have also lowered the prices for new M3 Reserved Instances by 15%. This price reduction applies to Reserved Instance purchases made on or after November 1, 2013.

— Jeff;

I’m happy to announce that we are reducing the prices for Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances.

Launched in 2011, Dedicated Instances run on hardware dedicated to a single customer account. They are ideal for workloads where corporate policies or industry regulations dictate physical isolation from instances run by other customers at the host hardware level.

Like our multi-tenant EC2 instances, Dedicated Instances let you take full advantage of On-Demand and Reserved Instance purchasing options. Todays price drop continues the AWS tradition of innovating to reduce costs and passing on the savings to our customers. This reduction applies to both the dedicated per region fee and the per-instance On-Demand and Reserved Instance fee across all supported instance types and all AWS Regions. Here are the details:

• Dedicated Per Region Fee An 80% price reduction from $10 per hour to $2 per hour in any Region where at least one Dedicated Instance of any type is running.
• Dedicated On-Demand Instances A reduction of up to 37% in hourly costs. For example the price of an m1.xlarge Dedicated Instance in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region will drop from $0.840 per hour to $0.528 per hour.
• Dedicated Reserved Instances A reduction of up to 57% on the Reserved Instance upfront fee and the hourly instance usage fee. Dedicated Reserved Instances also provide additional savings of up to 65% compared to Dedicated On-Demand instances.

These changes are effective July 1, 2013 and will automatically be reflected in your AWS charges.

To launch a Dedicated Instance via the AWS Management Console, simply choose a target VPC and select the Dedicated Tenancy option when you configure your instance. You can also create a Dedicated VPC to ensure that all instances launched within it are Dedicated Instances.

To learn more about Dedicated Instances and to see a complete list of prices, please visit the Dedicated Instances page.

— Jeff;

I’m happy to announce that we are lowering the price of Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) database instances, both On-Demand and Reserved.

On-Demand prices have been reduced as much as 18% for MySQL and Oracle BYOL (Bring Your Own License) and 28% for SQL Server BYOL. All of your On-Demand usage will automatically be charged at the new and lower rates effective June 1, 2013.

Reserved Instance prices have been reduced as much as 27% for MySQL and Oracle BYOL. The new prices apply to Reserved Instance purchases made on or after June 11, 2013.

Here is a table to illustrate the total cost of ownership for an m2.xlarge DB Instance for MySQL or Oracle BYOL using a 3-year Reserved Instance:

Although Reserved Instance purchases are non-refundable, we are making a special exception for 1-year RI’s purchased in the last 30 days and 3-year RI’s purchased in the last 90 days. For a limited time, you can exchange recently purchased RI’s for new ones. You’ll receive a pro-rata refund of the upfront fees that you paid at purchase time. If you would like to exchange an RDS Reserved Instance for a new one, simply contact us.

As you may know from my recent blog post, we have made a lot of progress since releasing Amazon RDS just 3.5 years ago. In addition to the recently announced Service Level Agreement (SLA) for Multi-AZ database instances, you have the ability to provision up to 30,000 IOPS for demanding production workloads, encryption at rest using Oracle’s Transparent Data Encryption, and simple disaster recovery using Multi-AZ and read replicas.

— Jeff;

PS – Here’s a full list of AWS price reductions.