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Disparity between test and production environment
Our Production environment is running on a Tier M5 instance with 4 CPUs and 16GB RAN. The test environment is operating on a T3 Medium instance with 2 CPUs and 4GB Ram. This mismatch is limiting our ability to fully validate configurations and updates before deploying them production.
The instance we are wanting to increase is an RDS. we paid 1-year reserved instances, a prepaid yearly fee, for a t3.medium for our Zone A RDS. Our production environment is running m5.xlarge. Is there a way to change the instance type from t3.medium to t5.xlarge without incurring a penalty( e.g. wasted cost on t3.medium that we aren’t using)
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When changing an EC2 instance type, you can do so without losing data or settings if your instance is EBS-backed and the configurations are compatible. However, your question specifically relates to changing an RDS instance type from t3.medium to m5.xlarge when you have already purchased a 1-year Reserved Instance (RI) for the t3.medium.
Unfortunately, Reserved Instances are tied to the specific instance type you purchased them for. If you change your RDS instance from t3.medium to m5.xlarge, you will still be charged for the t3.medium Reserved Instance for the remainder of your commitment period, plus you'll incur the on-demand charges for the new m5.xlarge instance.
There isn't a direct way to convert or transfer your existing Reserved Instance from one instance type to another without incurring additional costs. The Reserved Instance for t3.medium will continue to apply its discount to any t3.medium instances in your account in the specified region, but it won't apply to an m5.xlarge instance.
Your options are:
- Continue using the t3.medium until the RI term expires, then upgrade
- Upgrade to m5.xlarge now and accept that you'll be paying for both the unused RI and the new instance
- Consider if a t3.xlarge might be sufficient (though still not matching production) as it would be more cost-effective than moving to m5.xlarge while still having an unused t3.medium RI
For future planning, you might want to align your test and production environments more closely from the beginning to avoid this type of situation.
Sources
Change EC2 instance type | AWS re:Post
Amazon EC2 instance type changes - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
EC2 instance type | AWS re:Post
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