How not to lose money on AWS RI standard

AWS Reserved Instances is a compute capacity reserving method for a committed term of 1 or 3 years, which provides upto 75% discount when compared to the usage of on-demand instances. The cost savings aspect, out of the long term commitment, is the most prominent reason why people/teams purchase RI

But when reality strikes, organizations end up having un-utilized reserved instances, thus losing money on the investment made on RI(s)

So the best deal on the table, to gain from the under or not utilized RI Purchase (Standard) is to Resell the unused RI(s) in AWS Marketplace. Below is the high level process representation of selling the RI(Standard) capacity on AWS marketplace

Pre-requisites for resale:

1. RI is standard type of purchase
2. RI is for EC2 and not for RDS or Elasticache
3. RI(EC2) not purchased under volume discounts
4. AWS accounts not par of India accounts
5. AWS accounts/owner has US bank & Tax details for to sell in marketplace

Possible reasons for RI under utilization:

1. Business is moving to different region than the originally planned
2. Project or requirement is completed well ahead of schedule
3. Capacity utilization was not as anticipated

Benefits of selling in AWS Marketplace:

1. Inspire of various limitations on selling the capacity back onto AWS Marketplace, AWS provides an option to resell the capacity on hand
2. Money is not lost entirely by unused instances and saves on cost
3. RI(standard) can be released in the marketplace, after registering as 'Seller', providing Bank & Tax details and list the instances with your price
4. Listed RI(s) price can be modified as needed
5. On sale of RI(s), owner of the RI will be emailed about the details and AWS Automated clearing house wire transfer will be made to the AWS account owner of RI(s) bank details(shared earlier while registering for the AWS marketplace)

AWS Marketplace is digital catalog where curated third party softwares/solutions can be purchased or sold for other companies/clients to use it for subscription based charges for the service provided

How to identify RI usage effectiveness?
Use AWS "RI Utilization Report" to find out the actual utilization of the RI instances purchased. By this way, we can find out under utilized or not utilized instances and call for action

How to identify RI actual usage ?
Use AWS "RI Coverage Report" to find out how much of the accounts' EC2 usage is being covered from RI purchase

With the above way, customers can save on costs spent on purchase of RI(s) and can follow the AWS Compute Optimizer and/or AWS Cost Explorer recommendations for future purchase of RI

Happy cost savings !!