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:

 

  • Amazon Simple Storage Service
  • AWS Lambda
  • Amazon Glacier
  • Amazon Sumerian
  • Amazon Relational Database Service
  • Amazon SimpleDB
  • AWSCloudDirectoryInternal
  • Amazon CloudSearch
  • AWS IoT
  • Amazon Lightsail
  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
  • AWS Elastic Beanstalk
  • Amazon Simple Notification Service
  • AWS Config
  • Amazon Redshift
  • AmazonCloudWatch
  • Amazon Elastic File System
  • AWS Data Pipeline
  • Amazon ElastiCache
  • Amazon CloudFront
  • Amazon Elastic Transcoder
  • Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
  • Amazon Lex
  • AWS Data Transfer
  • Amazon Simple EDI
  • AWS OpsWorks
  • AWS Storage Gateway
  • Amazon Simple Email Service
  • Amazon Machine Learning
  • Amazon SageMaker
  • Amazon Elastic MapReduce
  • AWS X-Ray
  • Amazon DynamoDB
  • Amazon EC2 Container Registry (ECR)
  • AWS Glue
  • AWS Budgets
  • Amazon Polly
  • Amazon Route 53
  • AWS Support (Basic)
  • Amazon Elasticsearch Service
  • AWS CloudTrail
  • Amazon Rekognition
  • AWS Key Management Service
  • Amazon Simple Queue Service
  • Amazon AppStream
  • Amazon Kinesis 
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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  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'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't see it before I clicked the old purchase button 😉
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      Their support team have been lovely, they'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've not decided whether or not I'm going to keep this in place or not yet  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'll see.
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      Workmail isn't covered by the credit, thats $4 per user per month, but to be honest, it is so much better than what I'm used to with my previous host, it makes me realise just how great an enterprise level solution it is.
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