Promotional credit can not be used for Reserved Instances!

I’ve started to play around with Bamboo and a few other bits and pieces in an evening and I’ve managed to find a few promotional $150 vouchers for AWS that you would usually get from AWS training courses on ebay – prices range from about £11 to £35 depending on expiry.  Bamboo will not run on a T3 micro – it just doesn’t have the CPU capacity – definitely needs 2cpus, even for a tiny installation – that’s Java for you 😉

I had a spot instance running but it kept going away due to capacity.  It’s running again on a spot instance but I’ve whacked up the price to $1 an hour now so hopefully that’ll never go away.  But again, I’m putting database backups in place to make sure it doesn’t go anywhere, should it go down.

I’ve got $450 of credit on my account and it goes towards the EC2 cost along with quite a few other services.  Here’s the complete list:

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      So, seeing that EC2 was in the list, and there was no way in hell I was going to burn through that much credit by the end of next year, I decided to purchase some Reserved Instances.  A T3 micro for 3 years and a T3 small for one year, all upfront &#8211; total cost was $264 + 20% VAT.  And this charged itself directly to my credit card, with pretty much no confirmation.  To be fair to Amazon, I did click the purchase button, I just expected to see a final confirmation screen that showed me where the funds were going to be coming from.  That didn&#8217;t happen.
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      To be fair, there is documentation to support that:
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      <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/credits-ri/">https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/credits-ri/</a>
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    I just didn&#8217;t see it before I clicked the old purchase button 😉
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      Their support team have been lovely, they&#8217;ve managed to cancel the Reserved Instances and are starting the process to refund me.  I upgraded to developer support at $29 a month to get my request actioned sooner.  I&#8217;ve not decided whether or not I&#8217;m going to keep this in place or not yet &#8211; there are benefits to it for sure, and as I start to do more and more with it over the coming months, it might be a good idea.  We&#8217;ll see.
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      Workmail isn&#8217;t covered by the credit, thats $4 per user per month, but to be honest, it is so much better than what I&#8217;m used to with my previous host, it makes me realise just how great an enterprise level solution it is.
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