Amazon EC2 reserved and retired instances

Question

I can see from billing that we purchased 4 reserved EC2 instances in 2 batches of 2 earlier this year.

We are currently using 2 EC2 instances.

In the list of purchased reserved instances, I can see 2 listed as active, and 2 listed as retired. Can you tell me what "retired" means and if they are still usable?

Thanks

Answer 1

In addition to the previously mentioned term expiration or billing issue, one other reason for a retired reservation is when you modify your reservation. This is when you convert an instance size to another. For example, 1x m1.xlarge instances into 8x m1.small instances.

Answer 2

We have a different situation with the same symptom -- instances we're using, which happen to be of a type we reserved are described in "Events" on the console as "The instances is running on degraded hardware". We did get an email and stopping (in my case, I had to try a second time to force), then starting got us back on shiny new hardware.

Answer 3

To add, since I think this point is important enough to put as an answer, Amazon WILL NOT notify you by email or whatever that your reserved instances are about to expire (at least they didn't me).

So if you suddenly get a huge bill then chances are your terms have run out. At this point Amazon will put your reserved instances to retired and put your active instances, which were previously using the reserved policy, to normal rate pay per hour instances.

So it is important to monitor exactly when your term expires to avoid retiring of reserved instances.

Answer 4

"Retired" means that a reserved instance purchase is no longer in effect.

Usually this would be because the term expired (1 year, 3 years, etc). However, according to this thread, it looks like it could also mean that there was a problem processing payment.

Either way, retired instances are no longer usable.