Customers use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to run every type of workload imaginable, including web hosting, big data processing, high-performance computing (HPC), virtual desktops, live event streaming, and databases. Some of these workloads are so critical that customers asked for the ability to reserve capacity for them.

To help customers flexibly reserve capacity, we launched EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations (ODCRs) in 2018. Since then, customers have used capacity reservations (CRs) to run critical applications like hosting consumer websites, streaming lives sporting events and processing financial transactions.

Today, we’re announcing the ability to get capacity for future workloads using CRs. Many customers have future events such as product launches, large migrations, or end-of-year sales events like Cyber Monday or Diwali. These events are critical, and customers want to ensure they have the capacity when and where they need it.

While CRs helped customers reserve capacity for these events, they were only available just-in-time. So customers either needed to provision the capacity ahead of time and pay for it or plan with precision to provision CRs just-in-time at the start of the event.

Now you can plan and schedule your CRs up to 120 days in advance. To get started you specify the capacity you need, the start date, delivery preference, and the minimum duration you commit to use the capacity reservation. There are no upfront charges to schedule a capacity reservation. After Amazon EC2 evaluates and approves the request, it will activate the reservation on the start date, and customers can use it to immediately launch instances.

Getting started with future-dated capacity reservations
To reserve your future-dated capacity, choose Capacity Reservations on the Amazon EC2 console and select Create On-Demand Capacity Reservation, and choose Get started.

To create a capacity reservation, specify the instance type, platform, Availability Zone, platform, tenancy, and number of instances you are requesting.

In the Capacity Reservation details section, choose At a future date in the Capacity Reservation starts option and choose your start date and commitment duration.

You can also choose to end the capacity reservation at a specific time or manually. If you select Manually, the reservation has no end date. It will remain active in your account and continue to be billed until you manually cancel it. To reserve this capacity, choose Create.

After you create your capacity request, it appears in the dashboard with an Assessing status. During this state, AWS systems will work to determine if your request is supportable which is usually done within 5 days. Once the systems determine the request is supportable, the status will be changed to Scheduled. In rare cases, your request may be unsupported.

On your scheduled date, the capacity reservation will change to an Active state, the total instance count will be increased to the amount requested, and you can immediately launch instances.

After activation, you must hold the reservation for at least the commitment duration. After the commitment duration elapses, you can continue to hold and use the reservation if you’d like or cancel it if no longer needed.

Things to know
Here are some things that you should know about the future-dated CRs:

• Evaluation – Amazon EC2 considers multiple factors when evaluating your request. Along with forecasted supply, Amazon EC2 considers how long you plan to hold the capacity, how early you create the Capacity Reservation relative to your start date, and the size of your request. To improve the ability of Amazon EC2 to support your request, create your reservation at least 56 days (8 weeks) before the start date. You need to submit a request for at least 100 vCPUs for only C, M, R, T, I instance types. The recommended minimum commitment for most requests will be 14 days.
• Notification – We recommend monitoring the status of your request through the console or Amazon EventBridge You can use these notifications to trigger automation or send an email or text update. To learn more, visit Send an email when events happen using Amazon EventBridge in the Amazon EventBridge User Guide.
• Pricing – Future dated capacity reservations are billed just like regular CRs. It is charged at the equivalent On-Demand rate whether you run instances in reserved capacity or not. For example, if you create a future dated CR for 20 instances and run 15 instances, you will be charged for 15 active instances and for 5 unused instances in the reservation including the minimum duration. Savings Plans apply to both unused reservations and instances running on the reservation. To learn more, visit Capacity Reservation pricing and billing in the Amazon EC2 User Guide.

Now available
Future dated EC2 Capacity Reservations are now available today in all AWS Regions where Amazon EC2 Capacity Reservations are available.

Give Amazon EC2 Capacity Reservations a try in the Amazon EC2 console. To learn more, visit On-Demand Capacity Reservations in the Amazon EC2 User Guide and send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon EC2 or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy