This blog post was written by Ben Schaechter, Co-Founder & CEO of Vantage. Ben previously worked on the technical product management team for cont

AWS Savings Plan and Reserved Instance Policy Changes for Resellers

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2024-11-25 17:00:07

This blog post was written by Ben Schaechter, Co-Founder & CEO of Vantage. Ben previously worked on the technical product management team for container services at AWS and the product management team for compute at DigitalOcean. All of the information in the blog post is based upon publicly available information and no confidential information.

Last year, I published a blog post on some subtle albeit material changes to AWS’s enforcement of policies on Reserved Instances. As AWS never made an official announcement on the policy, that blog post served as the first community resource for the changes.

Roughly a year later, AWS is back with some even more material changes to their policies that will have significant ramifications for Managed Service Providers, Cloud Resellers, and the customers of the two aforementioned groups. This blog post is meant to explain the situation in casual terms, offer opinion as to why AWS is making these changes, and give recommendations to impacted customers for next steps.

AWS is making a policy update that prohibits the sharing of Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans (SPs) across end customers within a single AWS Organization. The new policy will become effective June 1, 2025, which is fairly quick by AWS standards. AWS claims that “These changes are aimed at aligning the partner actions to AWS’ intent for RI and SPs to be customer specific commitment-based pricing products.”