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EC2 Reserved Instance Payment Failed

Trend Cloud One™ – Conformity is a continuous assurance tool that provides peace of mind for your cloud infrastructure, delivering over 1000 automated best practice checks.

Risk Level: High (not acceptable risk)
Rule ID: EC2-050

Identify any failed Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances (RIs) available within your AWS account and follow the Trend Cloud One™ – Conformity guidelines for remediation in order to receive a significant discount (up to 75% depending on the commitment term) for EC2 hourly charges. A failed Amazon EC2 RI is an unsuccessful reservation that received the "payment-failed" status during the purchase process.

This rule can help you with the following compliance standards:

  • APRA
  • MAS
  • AWAF

For further details on compliance standards supported by Conformity, see here.

This rule resolution is part of the Conformity Security & Compliance tool for AWS.

Cost
optimisation

Reserved Instances (RIs) represent a good strategy to cut down on Amazon EC2 costs but to fully receive the discount benefit you need to make sure that all your EC2 reservation purchases have been successfully completed.

Audit

To identify any failed Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance purchases available within your AWS cloud account, perform the following actions:

Using AWS Console

01 Sign in to the AWS Management Console.

02 Navigate to Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

03 In the navigation panel, under Instances, choose Reserved Instances.

04 Click inside the Filter by attributes or search by keyword box located under the console top menu, choose State, and select Payment Failed. This filtering technique will return the failed Amazon EC2 reservation purchases available within the current AWS cloud region. If the Amazon EC2 console returns one or more Reserved Instances, the purchase process for the returned Reserved Instances (RIs) has failed, therefore you must take action and retry your failed reservation payment by contacting AWS Support Center.

05 Change the AWS cloud region from the console navigation bar and repeat the audit process for other regions.

Using AWS CLI

01 Run describe-instances command (OSX/Linux/UNIX) using predefined and custom query filters to list the IDs of the failed Amazon EC2 reservation purchases available in the selected AWS region: 

aws ec2 describe-reserved-instances
  --region us-east-1
  --filters "Name=state,Values=payment-failed"
  --output table
  --query 'ReservedInstances[*].ReservedInstancesId'

02 The command output should return a table with Reserved Instance IDs if there are failed reservation purchases within the selected AWS cloud region or an empty table if there are no failed Amazon EC2 reservations: 

----------------------------------------
|        ReservedInstancesIds          |
+--------------------------------------+
| abcdabcd-1234-abcd-1234-abcd1234abcd |
| 12341234-abcd-1234-abcd-1234abcd1234 |
----------------------------------------

If the describe-instances command output returns one or more reservation IDs, there are failed Reserved Instance (RI) purchases available in the selected AWS cloud region, therefore you must take action and retry your failed reservation payment by contacting AWS Support Center.

03 Change the AWS cloud region by updating the --region command parameter value and repeat the audit process for other regions.

Remediation / Resolution

To mitigate unsuccessful Amazon EC2 reservations you have to retry your failed Reserved Instance payments by contacting Amazon Web Services. To create a support case for failed reservation payments, perform the following actions:

Note 1: Failed Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance (RI) purchases from previous billing periods can't be retried.

Note 2: Creating a support case to request to retry your failed Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance payments using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) is not currently supported.

Using AWS Console

01 Sign in to the AWS Management Console.

02 Navigate to AWS Support Center console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/support/.

03 In the Open support cases section, choose Create case to initiate the request process.

04 On the Create case page, perform the following operations:

  1. Select Account and billing support option.
  2. Select Billing from the Type dropdown list.
  3. Select Reserved Instances from the Category dropdown list.
  4. Provide the request subject in the Subject box, e.g. "Retry failed Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance payments".
  5. For Description, provide a concise description of the issues and include the reservation ID(s) for the Reserved Instance(s) that you want to discuss. This will help the AWS support team to evaluate your request.
  6. For Contact options, choose your preferred correspondence language from the Preferred contact language dropdown list, then select a preferred contact method that AWS support team can use to respond to your request from the Contact methods section.
  7. Choose Submit to send your request to Amazon Web Services. A customer support representative should contact you shortly.

References

Publication date Mar 7, 2017

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