Launch: Reservation Expiration Alerts

September 7, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details.

Reservations, sometimes referred to as Reserved Instances, allow you to achieve significant savings (sometimes up to 75%) as compared to On-Demand Instance usage costs. The savings is in exchange for committing to a 1- or 3-year term of usage. Reservation models are offered for Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service), and Amazon Redshift.

A common request that we have been hearing from customers is that they would like to receive notifications when their reservations are expiring, so we dove deep to figure out which notification time frames made the most sense to these customers and worked backwards from there.

This post covers the high-level process for accessing information regarding your reservations. I also describe how you can better monitor your reservation portfolio using the new expiration alert feature set.

Reservation management overview

Managing your reservations portfolio can be the key to maximizing your reservation-related savings. The best way to get started is by navigating to the Reservations summary page within AWS Cost Explorer.

The Reservations summary page provides an overview of the reservations that you own and your associated savings. In the following screenshot, my reservation portfolio could certainly benefit from some additional attention, especially relating to increasing my Amazon EC2 reservation coverage for my active reservation. This page also highlights the fact that I may want to consider purchasing a reservation to cover some of my Amazon RDS usage.

Setting reservation expiration alerts

Starting today, you can now use the new reservation expiration alerting feature. In the upper right corner, choose Manage alerts. This screen lets you define the time intervals to be notified at before your reservations expire.

Using reservation expiration alert capabilities, send yourself (and others) email notifications 7, 30, and 60 days before the expiration of your reservation, as well as on the actual date of expiration. These email notifications should look something like the following screenshot:

You can send reservation expiration alerts to up to 10 email subscribers. This helps you and your organization plan a reservation purchasing strategy. Please note that for customers who have consolidated their accounts into a single billing family, payer accounts will receive alerts regarding expiring reservations for all accounts.

Conclusion

This particular feature is geared towards simplifying the reservation management experience, but we’re always open to learning more about what would make managing your costs easier for you.

Please feel free to share your thoughts below!