# Underutilized EC2 Commitment Due to Workload Drift

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# Underutilized EC2 Commitment Due to Workload Drift

## Explanation

When EC2 usage declines, shifts to different instance families, or moves to other services (e.g., containers or serverless), organizations may find that previously purchased Standard Reserved Instances or Savings Plans no longer match current workload patterns.

This misalignment results in underutilized commitments-where costs are still incurred, but no usage is benefiting from the associated discounts. Since these commitments cannot be easily exchanged, refunded, or sold (except for eligible RIs on the RI Marketplace), the only viable path to recoup value is to steer workloads back toward the covered usage profile.

## Relevant Billing Model

- Standard RIs  are billed hourly for a specific instance type, family, region, and tenancy

- Compute Savings Plans  and  EC2 Instance Savings Plans  offer broader flexibility, but still require a minimum hourly usage commitment

- If actual usage falls below the commitment threshold, the difference is still billed, resulting in unused reservation charges

## Detection

- Identify underutilized Standard Reserved Instances or Savings Plans by analyzing usage versus commitment

- Break down which instance families, sizes, or regions are covered but underused

- Map current workloads that were previously on those instance types - and investigate why they shifted away (e.g., scaling, performance, compatibility)

- Look for gaps between what was committed and how workloads have evolved to highlight mismatches

## Remediation

- Review existing workloads to identify candidates that could migrate to the underutilized instance families

- For new or scaling workloads, prioritize launching on instance types that align with unused commitments

- Where possible, upgrade existing workloads to fit larger reserved types - while tracking the change to avoid overcommitment in future renewals

- Document any shifts made to accommodate current commitments and revisit those configurations once the reservation or plan term expires

## Relevant Documentation

- [EC2 Reserved Instances](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved-instances/)

- [Savings Plans](https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/)

- [Reserved Instance Marketplace](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-market-general.html)

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## At a glance

Reference

CER-0151

Cloud provider

AWS

Service

AWS EC2

Category

[Compute](https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub/service-category/compute)

Inefficiency type

Overcommitted Reservation

## Contributed by

- Jason DiDomenico 

### Jason DiDomenico

Director of FinOps @ Discover Financial Services

[LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasondidomenico/)

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Source: the public page above. Product screenshots and illustrative interfaces are examples, not live customer data.