Amazon has launched AWS Scheduled Reserved Instances and CloudWatch Events to boost its cloud services and, the company claimed, reduce costs for those running specific workloads.
Scheduled Reserved Instances (SRI) allows businesses to run certain workloads at specific times, rather than having to constantly run them. Organisations can specify in advance when they want those instances to run, such as daily, weekly or monthly and only pay for the time it is in use, with a discounted rate for 'pre-booking' uptime over an annual period.
"With this launch, we now have two types of Reserved Instances. The original Reserved Instance (now called Standard Reserved Instance) model allows you to reserve EC2 compute capacity for a one- or three-year term and use them at any time," AWS's Jeff Bar wrote on the AWS blog.
"The new Scheduled Reserved Instance model allows you to reserve instances for predefined blocks of time on a recurring basis for a one-year term, with prices that are generally five to 10 percent lower than the equivalent on-demand rates."
Cloudwatch Events is the second new feature available to AWS users, allowing companies to better track, control and monitor their environments, with greater transparency than before.
Changes to an environment are reflected instantly and managers can react if needed, reducing the time it takes to make reactionary changes and cutting overheads.
"You can think of CloudWatch Events as the central nervous system for your AWS environment. It is wired in to every nook and cranny of the supported services, and becomes aware of operational changes as they happen, Barr said.
"Then, driven by your rules, it activates functions and sends messages to respond to the environment, making changes, capturing state information, or taking corrective action."
Both SRI and Cloudwatch Events are available in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS regions.
