Summary: Amazon just announced a new pricing model for reserved instances. At a quick glance, it appears to be better in some scenarios, worse in others. For instance, the "No Upfront" option gives a 30% to 50% discount from on demand pricing, with no upfront payment -- though you have to commit to using the instance for a full year. On the other hand, a 3-year Light Utilization reservation used to be a great way to get a substantial discount without much upfront obligation, and that doesn't seem to be possible any more. (Though you can still buy Light and Medium Utilization reservations until Feb. 2.)

"Simplifying". Now you have 3 ways to pay for the same thing, so now it is simple.

You have an extra ~3% discount for the all upfront method, comparing with the partial upfront. The financials here does not look good (for the user).

There's quite a few types of servers that have larger discounts (~10%), such as the 1 year terms for m3, c3, g2 (which is ~12%), etc.

Also, the previous model[1] had three different types of reserved instances-- light, medium, and heavy usage. These gave discounts based on the actual number of hours utilized, which is harder to keep track of than the new three choices.

[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-insta...

Gee, thanks Amazon for making my spreadsheets even more complicated... I love AWS, but figuring out the cost/benefits of any addition to their offerings is becoming increasingly hard.

You could also think of it like a 25% to 30% discount on your ondemand infrastructure without anything other than a YES I will keep the infrastructure.