AWS is banning the resale of its discounted EC2 Reserved Instances on the Reserved Instance Marketplace starting January 15, 2024. This change will make AWS Reserved Instances a 100% consumption lock-in, making them riskier for workloads with changing demand. As an alternative, Kubernetes users can use automation to optimize their cloud costs and resource utilization, offering improved flexibility, scalability, and ease of provisioning over capacity commitments like AWS EC2 Reserved Instances. Automation allows for workload and node rightsizing, automated instance type selection, automated bin packing, autoscaling, spot instance automation, and scheduled node optimization, ultimately leading to significant cost savings without the need for capacity commitments.