I’m a bit flummoxed by Amazon Web Services support. They are telling us that EC2 reserved instance pricing might apply only to instances cloned from certain base instances, and that if we upload our own AMIs, we might or might not be able to apply reserved instance pricing. We’ve been trying for weeks, without success, to get a straight answer to a simple question.

The best they can tell us is to start an instance, buy a reservation, and ask for a refund if it doesn’t apply.

For the purposes of planning ahead, that’s a terrible answer. Well, for any purposes at all, that’s a terrible answer. Do they not know how their own billing process works?

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