The AWS team is always exploring ways to reduce costs and to pass the savings along to our customers. We’re more than happy to continue this tradition with our latest price reduction.

Starting today, we are reducing prices for new EC2 Reserved Instances running Linux/UNIX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server by up to 27%. This reduction applies to the Standard (m1), Second-Generation Standard (m3), High-Memory (m2), and High-CPU (c1) instance families. As always, if you reserve more, you will save more. To be more specific, you will automatically receive additional savings when you have more than $250,000 in active upfront Reserved Instance fees.

With this price reduction, Reserved Instances will provide savings of up to 65% in comparison to On-Demand instances. Here are the price decreases by instance family and Region:

Price Decrease (%) Region m1 m2 m3 c1

US East (Northern Virginia) 13.0% 23.2% 13.2% 10.1% US West (Northern California) 13.3% 27.7% 13.3% 10.0% US West (Oregon) 13.0% 23.2% 13.2% 10.1% AWS GovCloud (US) 0.6% 13.9% 1.1% 2.1% Europe (Ireland) 13.3% 27.7% 13.5% 10.0% Asia Pacific (Singapore) 4.9% 19.8% 4.9% 2.4% Asia Pacific (Tokyo) 4.9% 20.8% 5.0% 2.2% Asia Pacific (Sydney) 4.9% 19.8% 4.9% 2.4% South America (So Paulo) 4.9% 21.1% 4.9% 0.0%

These new prices apply to all three Reserved Instance models (Light, Medium, and Heavy Utilization) for purchases made on or after March 5, 2013.

We recommend that you review your usage once a month to determine if you should alter your Reserved Instance footprint by buying additional Reserved Instances or selling them on the AWS Reserved Instance Marketplace. However, if you havent done it lately, now is the perfect opportunity to review your existing usage and determine if now is the right time to purchase new Reserved Instances. Here are some general guidelines to help you choose the most economical model:

If your server is running less than 15% of the time, use an On-Demand instance.

If your server is runninng 15% and 40% of the time, use a Light Utlization Reserved Instance.

If your server is running 40% to 80% of the time, use a Medium Utilization Reserved Instance.

If your server is running 80% to 100% of the time, use a Heavy Utilization Reserved Instance.

For more information on making the choice that is right for you, see my blog post on Additional Reserved Instance Options for Amazon EC2.

During the month of March, you can take advantage of a free trial of AWS Trusted Advisor to generate a personalized report on how you can optimize your bill by taking advantage of the new, lower Reserved Instance prices. For more information about Trusted Advisor, see my post about the AWS Trusted Advisor Update + Free Trial.

To learn more about this feature and other Amazon EC2 pricing options, please visit the Amazon EC2 Pricing and the Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Page.

— Jeff;