Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations Can Now Be Shared Across Multiple AWS Accounts

You can now share Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations with another AWS account or within your AWS Organization. When a Capacity Reservation is shared, EC2 instances launched by one AWS account can utilize EC2 capacity reserved by another account. This feature is enabled by AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM), a service that allows you to easily and securely share AWS resources.

Launched in Oct 2018, EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations let you reserve EC2 capacity for any duration. Once you create a Capacity Reservation, the EC2 capacity is held for you regardless of whether you run the instances or not. Until now, Capacity Reservations were confined to an AWS account. By sharing Capacity Reservations, organizations with EC2 usage spread across multiple AWS accounts can plan for capacity needs at an aggregate level. Workloads with fluctuating or complementary compute needs running in different accounts can tap into centrally reserved EC2 capacity. As a result, organizations can optimize costs by increasing utilization of reserved capacity. This feature is available at no additional cost.

You can share EC2 Capacity Reservations in three easy steps: create a Resource Share through AWS Resource Access Manager, add resources (Capacity Reservations) to the Resource Share, and specify the target accounts that you wish to share the resources with. You can do this through the AWS Management Console, or AWS SDK/CLI. As before, Regional RI discounts automatically apply to any matching Capacity Reservations. This gives you the flexibility to selectively add capacity reservations and still get the Regional RI discounts for that usage.

This feature is now available in US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (N. California and Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo), Canada (Central), and EU (Ireland, Frankfurt, London, and Paris) AWS Regions.

To learn more about sharing of Capacity Reservations, visit Capacity Reservation FAQs, or Linux or Windows user guides.