Reserving and using an AWS Reserved Instance

In this document, I am going to show you how I reserved a t2.medium instance for a 12 month period. It cost us just $445/year. This is huge savings for the company!

Purchasing a Reserved Instance:
Go to the AWS Home page and click EC2 . On the EC2 Dashboard, locate the Reserved Instances Menu link

Creating that Specific Machine Instance in that Specific Region

The way it works is like this:

You have now Reserved an instance with a certain same machine configuration in a certain region.

All you have done up to now is that you reserved a ticket but with no seat number. That is, you still have to book that Instance.

For example, I reserved a t2.medium machine in us-east-1a because it was available. I must go to the AWS console and reserve a t2.medium instance in the us-east-1a region now.

Confirming Billing Report shows Reserved Instance Savings

Now that you have reserved an instance, you want to make sure that it is indeed saving you money.

It takes 4 Business days for the billing section to show the savings you got from your Reserved instance.