AWS has recently updated its Reserved Instance policy for customers currently on EDP (Enterprise Discount Pricing). Starting Jan 15th, 2024, EDP customers can no longer sell any discounted RIs on the AWS marketplace. If you own discounted RIs, you probably received an email from AWS similar to this: 

"We have identified that you may have listed or sold EC2 Reserved Instances (“RIs”) that received a discount (RI Volume Discount or others) on the Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Marketplace. AWS does not permit the resale of RIs obtained through a discount program under Section 5.5 of our AWS Service Terms and so, starting January 15, 2024, AWS may block all sales of discounted RIs on the RI Marketplace. However, as a sign of goodwill, until January 15, 2024, we will allow you to list discounted RIs on EC2 RI Marketplace, as long as such discounted RIs were bought before 1-Oct-2023."

If AWS upholds this position, you will own these RIs for the term of the original commitment.

What Are Discounted RIs?

Organizations in the AWS Enterprise Discount Program typically spend more than $1 million per year with AWS have access to discounted Reserved Instances. They generally appear on your CUR (Cost and Usage Report) as RiVolumeDiscount. 

nOps users can quickly see their Discounted Reserved Instances in the platform by filtering on RIVolumeDiscount

Filtering on RIVolumeDiscount in nOps to find all of the discounted RIs
Filtering on RIVolumeDiscount in nOps to find all of the discounted RIs

Saving Plans are the Path Forward

Many EDP customers leverage Reserved Instances over Savings Plans because they can sell them on the marketplace if their usage and needs change and historically haven’t needed to keep them for the full term. 

While you can’t sell Savings Plans, they do provide their own advantages. Savings Plans allow you to use them for any type of EC2, Lambda, and Fargate instances. The main drawback when it comes to Savings Plans is that you are committing to an hourly level of compute usage for one or three years. And you are required to pay for your commitment whether you use it or not. 

This is where nOps can help.

nOps helps you get discounts on all of your compute usage. Any time there is underutilization of your Savings Plan, we provide buybacks. And our Compute Copilot helps ensure you’re fully utilizing your Savings Plans and it helps you get discounts on any usage above your Savings Plans but if you don’t use your capacity, we’ll buy it back.

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Savings Plans + Spot = Maximum Savings

Savings Plans don’t apply to Spot usage, which is a good thing. nOps Compute Copilot leverages Spot for EKS, Autoscaling, Batch, and ECS to maximize your discounts when you don’t typically have coverage from a Savings Plan. Here is a common utilization scenario we see. In the scenario below, all of the spikes would need to be covered by On-Demand.

However, Compute Copilot allows you to get discounts across 100% of your compute.


nOps Compute Copilot constantly manages the scheduling and scaling of your EKS workloads for the best price and stability. Here are a few of the benefits:

  • Optimize your RI, SP and Spot automatically for 50%+ savings — Copilot analyzes your organizational usage and market pricing to ensure you’re always on the best options.

  • Reliably run business-critical workloads on Spot. Our ML model predicts Spot terminations 60 minutes in advance.

  • All-in-one solution — get all the essential cloud cost optimization features (cost allocation, reporting, scheduling, rightsizing, & more) 

Copilot is entrusted with over one billion dollars of cloud spend. Join our satisfied customers who recently named us #1 in G2’s cloud cost management category by booking a demo today.