Amazon Web Services today introduced a new offering called Reserved Instance Marketplace, an online exchange of sorts where customers can sell their excess Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Reserved Instances to other businesses and organizations.
Amazon explains in a press release:
The Reserved Instance Marketplace gives customers the flexibility to sell the remainder of their Reserved Instances as their needs change, such as wanting to move instances to a new AWS Region, changing to a new instance type, or selling capacity for projects that end before the term expires. Amazon EC2 Instances purchased on the Reserved Instance Marketplace offer the same capacity reservations as Reserved Instances purchased directly from AWS….
Businesses can now shop the Reserved Instance Marketplace to purchase Reserved Instances outside the standard one-year and three-year term lengths. For example, a business that anticipates increased website traffic for a short period of time, or an organization wishing to spend its remaining end-of-year budget, will be able to search for Reserved Instances with shorter duration times.
As it faces new competition from the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and others, Amazon.com has continued to chop prices on its cloud offerings. This is one area where the tech giant has a great deal of experience, operating comfortably with the razor thin margins of retail.
Back in June, Amazon cut premium support prices and added lower pricing tiers to accommodate lighter usage.
