Another announcement from last week that got strangely little attention was Amazon’s introduction of EC2 Reserved Instances. Now reserved instances in the cloud may sound like an oxymoron but it is simply guaranteed capacity. You pay an upfront fee for the guarantee that your instance will be availabl and then a lower ongoing usage fee. Amazon clearly has a ton of usage information on EC2 available that let’s them price this fairly aggressively. For instance paying a 1-year guarantee fee redu...

Another announcement from last week that got strangely little attention was Amazon’s introduction of EC2 Reserved Instances. Now reserved instances in the cloud may sound like an oxymoron but it is simply guaranteed capacity. You pay an upfront fee for the guarantee that your instance will be availabl and then a lower ongoing usage fee. Amazon clearly has a ton of usage information on EC2 available that let’s them price this fairly aggressively. For instance paying a 1-year guarantee fee redu...