Amazon EC2 allows server capacities to be reserved in advance

Customers of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud can now reserve server capacities in advance. The required computing power can be planned up to 120 days before the deployment date. The service is aimed at companies that can already foresee increased demand. Examples include product releases or increased traffic during the Christmas period.

The costs of the pre-reserved capacities correspond to those of the regular instances. There is no reservation fee. Billing is based on usage; no advance payment is required. It does not matter whether users make use of the booked services or not. Amazon invoices all reserved server capacities for the planned period.

Booking only possible subject to reservation

To reserve server capacities, users enter the required performance data, the start date and the desired duration of use. Amazon carries out a check before confirming the booking. In addition to the available capacities for the planned period, Amazon takes into account the lead time and duration of use. The company therefore recommends reserving the servers at least eight weeks in advance and using them for more than 14 days. Amazon provides information on the current status of the reservation request via the EC2 console or EventBridge.

Previously, users could either only book server capacities at the time of the desired provision or had to order and pay for them in advance. In addition to the instances that can be reserved in advance, additional requirements that arise spontaneously can still be covered by booking instances for immediate use.

More information can be found in Amazon's AWS blog.

(sfe)