Alibaba Cloud ECS Reserved Instances

ECS Reserved Instances

A cost-effective purchasing option of Elastic Computing Services that provides high flexibility

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Reduce the costs of pay-as-you-go instances by as much as 79%

Reserve resources for pay-as-you-go instances

DevOps-friendly pricing model

Supports No Upfront, Partial Upfront, and All Upfront payment options

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Why Use Reserved Instances?

Financial Pain Points of Subscription and PAYG Billing

1.Subscription instances require lump sum prepayments and exert heavy upfront financial pressure.

2.Pay-as-you-go prices are high and not suitable for long-term and stable computing needs.

O&M Pain Points of Subscription and PAYG Billing

1.For subscription instances, discounts are exclusive to specific computing resources, limiting flexibility.

2.For subscription instances, you have to implement lifecycle management on a per-instance basis, which results in a huge O&M workload.

3.Without resource reservations, you may have to wait when you attempt to create pay-as-you-go instances.

Reserved Instances Help You to

1.Reduce costs: Compared with pay-as-you-go instances, reserved instances provide you with significant discounts up to 79%.

2.Ease financial pressure: In addition to All Upfront, reserved instances provide the Partial Upfront and No Upfront payment options, which allow you to pay low or none upfront payments, reducing financial pressure.

3.Improve O&M efficiency: Reserved instances are used in combination with pay-as-you-go instances. You can modify the scopes of reserved instances across zones and use reserved instances to create or release matching pay-as-you-go instances as needed.

4.Simplify lifecycle management: One reserved instance can match multiple pay-as-you-go instances. After the reserve instance expires, the pay-as-you-go instances that you create by using this reserve instance are not released.

5.Reserve resources: Zonal reserved instances provide resource reservations.

6.Deliver compute power: Reserved instances enable the direct delivery of compute power, and completely decouple discounts from specific instances, and allow enterprises to build their internal compute power pools.

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Features of Reserved Instances

Terms

3 Years (More Discount)

1 Year

Availability Zone

Regional Reserved Instances

- Support instance size flexibility

- Support zone flexibility

- Do not provide resource reservations

Zonal Reserved Instances

- Do not support instance size flexibility

- Do not support zone flexibility

- Provide resource reservations

Payment Options

No Upfront

Partial Upfront

All Upfront (Providing the Biggest Discount)

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Price

Low

High

Fluctuating

Low

Business Flexibility

Poor

Excellent

Good

Business Continuity

Guaranteed

Not Guaranteed

Guaranteed

Payment Flexibility

Poor

Excellent

Good

Resource Certainty

Provided

Not Provided

Provided

Price

Business Flexibility

Business Continuity

Payment Flexibility

Resource Certainty

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Case Studies

Resource Optimization of a Mobile Gaming Company

The lifecycle of each mobile game service provided by the mobile game company is about six months. When the DAU of a mobile game service drops, the company releases some ECS instances used by the service and purchases new ECS instances to run other online game services.
The company purchases Reserved Instances and uses them to create pay-as-you-go instances. Compared with subscription instances, this combination of reserved instances and pay-as-you-go instances streamlines O&M and financial procedures, helping the company save 15% on compute costs.

DevOps of an Internet Company

At an Internet company, different phases of a project lifecycle, such as development, testing, and deployment, require different levels of compute power.
The company used to purchase subscription instances to save costs. However, flexibility was affected because they cannot release or create instances as needed when resource distribution changes.
This situation drove their decision to switch to reserved instances. Compared with subscription instances, reserved instances provide similar compute cost effectiveness and higher business deployment flexibility.

Terms and Conditions

The ECS instance families of reserved instances cannot be changed.

There is a limit to the number of reserved instances that you can purchase. You can purchase a maximum of 20 regional reserved instances and a maximum of 20 zonal reserved instances in each zone.

You cannot upgrade or downgrade burstable instances (t5 instances) and can buy only zonal reserved instances for t5 instances.

Currently, reserved instances support the following ECS instance families: g5, c5, r5, ic5, hfc5, hfg5, sn1ne, sn2ne, se1ne, and i2 (in some regions).

Reserved instances cover only the compute (CPU and memory) costs of your pay-as-you-go instances, and the bandwidth and storage resources are still billed on a pay-as-you-go basis.