How to Find Available Reserved Instances
Before you can purchase a Reserved Instance, you must know what instances are available and where they are located.
The following is an example of how to find current Reserved Instance offerings with the ec2-describe-reserved-instances-offerings
command line tool.
PROMPT> ec2-describe-reserved-instances-offerings OFFERING 4b2293b4-5813-4cc8-9ce3-1957fc1dcfc8 m1.small us-east-1a 3y 0.00 0.00 m1.small offering in us-east-1a OFFERING 4b2293b4-5813-4cc8-9ce3-1957fc1dcfc7 c1.medium us-east-1b 1y 0.00 0.00 c1.medium offering in us-east-1b OFFERING 4b2293b4-5813-4cc8-9ce3-1957fc1dcfc6 c1.xlarge us-east-1c 1y 0.00 0.00 c1.xlarge offering in us-east-1c
In this example, there are 3 year Reserved Instances available for m1.small instances in us-east-1a, 1 year Reserved Instance available for c1.medium instances in us-east-1b, and 1 year Reserved Instances available for c1.xlarge instances in us-east-1a.