AWS Reserved Instance Contagion

AWS has begun quietly phasing out the transferability of discounted Reserved Instances (RIs), leading to discussions within the FinOps community about the implications of this change. Discounted RIs are those with additional customer-specific discounts beyond the standard rates, and AWS's recent move to stop their transfer could be a response to potential misuse by some vendors who exploit these discounts for profit, leading to what is termed "Reserved Instance Contagion." This practice allowed vendors to increase their revenue by transferring discounted RIs across customers, thus spreading bespoke discounts beyond their intended recipients. The policy shift hints at AWS's possible long-term intention to deprecate EC2 Reserved Instances in favor of more flexible options like Savings Plans, which do not allow for such transfers but provide modern compute savings solutions. Vantage, a FinOps platform unaffected by this change due to its primary revenue from core subscriptions, has audited its users to ensure no exploitation has occurred, reinforcing its commitment to ethical practices and encouraging the use of Savings Plans over RIs.