Regional and zonal Reserved Instances (scope) - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Differences between regional and zonal Reserved Instances
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Regional and zonal Reserved Instances (scope)

When you purchase a Reserved Instance, you determine the scope of the Reserved Instance. The scope is either regional or zonal.

  • Regional: When you purchase a Reserved Instance for a Region, it's referred to as a regional Reserved Instance.

  • Zonal: When you purchase a Reserved Instance for a specific Availability Zone, it's referred to as a zonal Reserved Instance.

The scope does not affect the price. You pay the same price for a regional or zonal Reserved Instance. For more information about Reserved Instance pricing, see Key variables that determine Reserved Instance pricing and Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances Pricing.

For more information about how to specify the scope of a Reserved Instance, see RI Attributes, specifically the Availability Zone bullet.

Differences between regional and zonal Reserved Instances

The following table highlights some key differences between regional Reserved Instances and zonal Reserved Instances:

Regional Reserved Instances Zonal Reserved Instances

Ability to reserve capacity

A regional Reserved Instance does not reserve capacity.

A zonal Reserved Instance reserves capacity in the specified Availability Zone.

Availability Zone flexibility

The Reserved Instance discount applies to instance usage in any Availability Zone in the specified Region.

No Availability Zone flexibility—the Reserved Instance discount applies to instance usage in the specified Availability Zone only.

Instance size flexibility

The Reserved Instance discount applies to instance usage within the instance family, regardless of size.

Only supported on Amazon Linux/Unix Reserved Instances with default tenancy. For more information, see Instance size flexibility determined by normalization factor.

No instance size flexibility—the Reserved Instance discount applies to instance usage for the specified instance type and size only.

Queuing a purchase

You can queue purchases for regional Reserved Instances.

You can't queue purchases for zonal Reserved Instances.

For more information and examples, see How Reserved Instances are applied.