AWS Instance to reserved insance

 

The way to get to Reserved billing is counterintuitive.

Basically, you have to pretend that you’re buying a new instance, of the Reserved type, with the exact same attributes of the one you want to convert. Upon making the purchase you will have converted the other one.

 

 

Basically, you have to pretend that you’re buying a new instance, of the Reserved type, with the exact same attributes of the one you want to convert. Upon making the purchase you will have converted the other one.

It’s gross, but it works.

1. Navigate to https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home.
2. Click on Reserved Instances.
3. Select an instance that matches the one you want to replace the billing on, for both instance type/size and instance availability zone. For example, mine was T2.Medium and US-East-1a.
4. Make the purchase.

So what then happens is that Amazon finds your running On Demand instance and converts it to a Reserved instance. And now if you go into billing you should see that reflected.

And more importantly, if you go into your instances dashboard you’ll just see the same ones you had before. You haven’t actually purchased a new box; you’ve just converted the one that matched those specs from On Demand to Reserved.

For anyone running a box in EC2 that isn’t likely to change in size or location over one to three years, I highly recommend you check out Reserved Instances. They could save you a massive amount of money, just like it did for me.

 

References:

https://danielmiessler.com/blog/saved-ec2-bill-5-minutes-switching-reserved-instance/