Reserve AWS EC2 beyond 3 years

Question

I am planning to purchase (all upfront) an EC2 instance from Amazon AWS but can I reserve it beyond 3 years, like for 6 years upfront at one time?

Answer 1

There are others service providers that would allow you to do that, you should check them out. A google search will give you many options.

Answer 2

While a 3-year Reserved Instance offers the most savings, a lot of technology changes over that period.

For example, here are some release dates:

• M3: October 2012
• M4: June 2015
• M5: November 2017

Therefore, you will probably want to move to a different technology after 3 years, which is likely to be both faster and cheaper (or at least the same price).

There are also Convertible Reserved Instances. They cost a bit more, but you can trade-in remaining periods as a credit for a new RI. This helps if you want to change instance families within the RI period.