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Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
User Guide for Linux Instances

Submitting Modification Requests

AWS provides you with several ways to view and work with modification requests: You can use the AWS Management Console, interact directly with the Amazon EC2 API, or use the command line interface.

Topics

AWS Management Console

Each target configuration row on the Modify Reserved Instances page keeps track of the number of instances for the current instance type (Count) and the instance size footprint of your reservation relative to its instance type (Units). For more information, see Understanding the Instance Size Footprint.

The allocated total is displayed in red if you have specified either more or fewer Reserved Instances than are available for modification. The total changes to green and you can choose Continue after you have specified changes for all the Reserved Instances that were available for modification.

To modify your Reserved Instances using the AWS Management Console

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

  2. On the Reserved Instances page, select one or more Reserved Instances to modify, and choose Modify Reserved Instances.

    Note

    The first entry in the modification table is the original, unmodified reservation. To modify the attributes of all reservations, choose new specifications from the menus. To modify or split only some of your reservations, add an additional line for each change.

  3. Choose Add for each additional attribute change and enter the number of reservations to modify in the Count field.

    • To change the Availability Zone, select a value in the Availability Zone list.

    • To change the network platform, select a value in the Network list.

    • To change the instance type, select a value in the Instance Type list.

  4. To delete a specified attribute, select X for that row.

    Note

    If the Modify Reserved Instances page contains only one row for attribute changes, you cannot delete that row. To modify multiple Reserved Instance attributes, first add a row for the new specifications and then delete the original row.

  5. Choose Continue.

  6. To confirm your modification choices when you finish specifying your target configurations, choose Submit Modifications. If you change your mind at any point, choose Cancel to exit the wizard.

Command Line Interface

You can complete modification tasks programmatically by using the AWS CLI (modify-reserved-instances), Amazon EC2 CLI (ec2-modify-reserved-instances), Amazon EC2 API (ModifyReservedInstances), and the AWS SDK for Java.

Amazon EC2 API

You can use the ModifyReservedInstances action to modify your Reserved Instances. For more information, see Amazon EC2 API Reference.

Determining the Status of Your Modification

You can determine the status of your modification request by looking at the state of the Reserved Instances that you are modifying. The state returned shows your request as in-progress, fulfilled, or failed. Use the following resources to get this information:

The following table illustrates the possible State values in the AWS Management Console

StateDescription

active (pending modification)

Transition state for original Reserved Instances.

retired (pending modification)

Transition state for original Reserved Instances while new Reserved Instances are being created.

retired

Reserved Instances successfully modified and replaced.

active

New Reserved Instances created from a successful modification request.

-Or-

Original Reserved Instances after a failed modification request.

Note

If you use the DescribeReservedInstancesModifications API action, the status of your modification request should show processing, fulfilled, or failed.

If your modification request succeeds:

  • The modified reservation becomes effective immediately and the pricing benefit is applied to the new instances beginning at the hour of the modification request. For example, if you successfully modify your reservations at 9:15PM, the pricing benefit transfers to your new instance at 9:00PM. (You can get the effective date of the modified Reserved Instances by using the DescribeReservedInstances API action or the ec2-describe- reserved-instances CLI command.)

  • The original reservation is retired. Its end date is the start date of the new reservation, and the end date of the new reservation is the same as the end date of the original Reserved Instance. If you modify a three-year reservation that had 16 months left in its term, the resulting modified reservation is a 16-month reservation with the same end date as the original one.

  • The modified reservation lists a $0 fixed price and not the fixed price of the original reservation.

Note

The fixed price of the modified reservation does not affect the discount pricing tier calculations applied to your account, which are based on the fixed price of the original reservation.

If your modification request fails:

  • Your Reserved Instances maintain their original configuration.

  • Your Reserved Instances are immediately available for another modification request.

For more information about why some Reserved Instances cannot be modified, see Requirements for Modification.