Amazon Web Services: Moving to a New Region

I wrote about Optimizing Your Amazon Web Services Costs back in November, where I mentioned some of the upsides of Reserved Instances at Amazon, but haven’t mentioned any downsides, and here we are. Two weeks later Amazon announced the Northern California Region opening. I thought it wouldn’t differ from the Virginia data center, but still decided to give it a shot for a few hours.

I didn’t do much benchmarking but hey, I’m running a Twitter app.. Foller.me, remember? This means that access times to the Twitter API are crucial, so I started off with some basic pinging, and the pings from California seemed to be a few times faster than the ones from Virginia. Next, I ran Xdebug and analyzed the cache grind sheets for a few requests to different profile pages. Sweet to know that 95% of the time taken to load a page is curl accessing the Twitter API ;) this means that my code is well optimized. The overall results in the California region was ~40% better than Virginia, so I thought of moving there. The problem was that I already had a 1 year contract with Amazon for an instance in the Virginia region.

I wrote to Amazon via their contact form and asked about reservation transfers from one region to another, of course with additional charges (the California region is slightly more expensive) and soon got a negative reply. They mentioned that reserved instances are not transferrable from one region to another but I can always cancel my reservation in one region and open up a new one in the other. They didn’t mention any refunds so I decided to ask, but soon, scrolling through their FAQ I found this:

Q: Can I move a Reserved Instance from one Region or Availability Zone to another?
A: No. Each Reserved Instance is associated with a specific Region and Availability Zone, which is fixed for the lifetime of the Reserved Instance and cannot be changed.

Q: Can I cancel a Reserved Instance?
A: The one-time payment for a Reserved Instances is not refundable. However, you can choose not to run or entirely stop using your Reserved Instance at any time, at which point you will not incur any further usage charges.

So I asked myself, why the heck would anybody want to cancel a reserved instance if they don’t get refunded? The conversation kept going on Twitter. Friends mentioned that I could purchase an additional reserved instance in the California region and then sell computing time on the one I have in Virginia, but that sounded too sarcastic. I felt unlucky and sad, and thought I thought should stick to the instance I had in Virginia. If only I had waited a few more weeks before making the purchase…

This morning I received another email from Amazon, stating that although they don’t usually do this sort of stuff, they got approval to process the cancellation with a refund just this one time, so now I’m free to reserve an instance in Northern California, happy holidays! Well, on Christmas Eve, this feels like a gift and I’m very excited about launching all my stuff in the new region, hopefully in January. So, thank you Amazon and Happy Holidays to all of you.