Amazon Web Services Launches Reserved Instance Marketplace

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Web Services is aiming to make it easier for businesses interested in purchasing reserved instances on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to buy instances from existing customers, eliminating the need to buy into one- or three-year terms.

The Amazon Web Services Reserved Instances Marketplace gives customers the ability to sell their Amazon EC2 reserved instances to other organizations. Using the new marketplace, customers can also browse for a wider selection of term lengths or pricing options. For customers that have purchased extra reserved instances, the marketplace gives them the ability to offload what they don’t need to other organizations.

The Amazon Reserved Instance Marketplace also gives customers flexibility to sell off the remainder of their reserved instances as their needs change. In some cases, this might mean a change to a different AWS region, a change to a new instance type or selling capacity for projects that end before the term expires.

“As more and more customers have started buying reserved instances, they’ve asked for ways to sell their reserved instances to change instance types or where instances are located, and they’ve asked for more reserved instance term length options. The Reserved Instance Marketplace addresses both of these customer needs,” said Peter De Santis, vice president of Amazon EC2, in a prepared statement.

The marketplace isn’t exactly a free-for-all. Users can view available stock through their own AWS Management Console to choose the instance that best matches their requirements. AWS deals with completing the transaction and transferring the ownership. After that, Amazon Web Services transfers the payment to the seller’s bank account via wire transfer.

“Balancing the use of AWS’s elastic on-demand capacity with the discounted reserved instance pricing, we are able to achieve maximum cost savings,” said Bill Platt, vice president of operations at Engine Yard, in a prepared statement. “Now, having the ability to leverage the Reserved Instance Marketplace, we can switch our capacity between instance types and regions, allowing us to further increase the cost advantages for our customers.”