#capacityreservations

Declaring future-dated Capacity Reservations for Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is used for databases, virtual desktops, big data processing, web hosting, HPC, and live event broadcasting. Customers requested the flexibility to reserve capacity for certain workloads because they are so important.

In 2018, EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations (ODCRs) were introduced to enable users to reserve capacity flexibly. Customers have since utilized capacity reservations (CRs) to run vital services such as processing financial transactions, hosting consumer websites, and live-streaming sporting events.

Today, AWS reveals that CRs can be used to determine the capacity for upcoming workloads. Many customers anticipate future events, such as product releases, significant migrations, or end-of-year sales occasions like Diwali or Cyber Monday. Since these events are crucial, customers want to be sure they have the capacity when and where they need it.

CRs were only available just-in-time, but they assisted clients in reserving capacity for certain events. Customers were therefore need to either carefully prepare to provision CRs just-in-time at the beginning of the event or provision the capacity in advance and pay for it.

Your CRs can now be planned and scheduled up to 120 days ahead of time. To begin, you provide the amount of capacity you require, the start date, your preferred delivery method, and the minimum amount of time you are willing to use the capacity reservation. Making a capacity reservation doesn’t cost anything up ahead. Following evaluation and approval of the request, Amazon EC2 will activate the reservation on the start date, allowing users to begin instances right away.

Beginning to make future-dated Capacity Reservations

Select Capacity Reservations in the Amazon EC2 console, then click Create On-Demand Capacity Reservation and click Get Started to reserve your future-dated capacity.

Indicate the instance type, platform, Availability Zone, platform, tenancy, and quantity of instances you want to reserve in order to create a capacity reservation.

Select the Capacity Reservation information section. Choose your start date and commitment period later on in the Capacity Reservation starts option.

Additionally, you can decide to manually or at a specified time terminate the capacity reserve. The reservation has no expiry date if you choose Manually. Unless you actively cancel it, it will stay in your account and keep getting billed. Click Create to reserve this capacity.

Your capacity request will show up in the dashboard with an Assessing status after it has been created. AWS systems will try to ascertain whether your request is supportable during this phase, which typically takes five days. The status will be changed to Scheduled as soon as the systems decide the request is feasible. Rarely, your request might not be able to be supported.

The capacity reserve will become Active on the day you have chosen, the total number of instances will be raised to the desired number, and you will be able to start instances right away.

You have to keep the reservation for the minimum amount of time specified when it is activated. You have the option to either cancel the reservation if it is no longer needed or keep it and use it if you would like after the commitment period has passed.

Things to consider

The following information concerning the future-dated Capacity Reservations is important for you to know:

Evaluation: When assessing your request, Amazon EC2 takes into account several parameters. In addition to the anticipated supply, Amazon EC2 considers the size of your request, the length of time you intend to hold the capacity, and how early you make the capacity reservation about your start date. Create your reservation at least 56 days (8 weeks) before the commencement date to increase Amazon EC2’s capacity to fulfill your request. For instance types C, M, R, T, and I only, you must require a minimum of 100 virtual CPUs. For the majority of requests, a 14-day minimum commitment is advised.

Notification: It suggests using the console or Amazon EventBridge to keep an eye on the progress of your request. These alerts can be used to send an email or SMS update or to start an automation process.

Cost: Future-dated capacity reservations are charged in the same way as standard CRs. Whether you run instances in reserved capacity or not, you are still charged the same On-Demand fee. For instance, you will be charged for 15 active instances and 5 unused instances in the reservation, including the minimum period, if you establish a future-dated CR for 20 instances and operate 15 instances. Both instances that are operating on the reservation and reservations that are not being used are covered by savings plans.

Currently offered

In all AWS regions where Amazon EC2 Capacity Reservations are available, EC2 future-dated Capacity Reservations are now accessible. Try Amazon EC2 Capacity Reservations in the Amazon EC2 console.