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EC2 Reserved Instance Payment Failed

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

Identify any failed Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances (RIs) available within your account and follow Cloud 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 AWS 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

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

Cost
optimisation

Reserved Instances represent a good strategy to cut down on AWS 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 EC2 RI purchases available within your AWS account, perform the following actions:

Using AWS Console

01 Sign in to the AWS Management Console.

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

03 In the left navigation panel, under INSTANCES section, choose Reserved Instances.

04 On EC2 Reserved Instances listing page, click inside the attributes filter box located under the dashboard top menu, choose State parameter from the dropdown list and select Payment Failed option. This filtering method i.e.

Payment Failed

will help you to determine if there are any failed EC2 reservation purchases available in the current AWS region. If one or more EC2 RIs matching the filter criteria are found, the purchase process for the returned Reserved Instance(s) has failed, therefore you need to retry your failed RI(s) payment by contacting AWS Support Center (see Remediation/Resolution section for more details).

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

Using AWS CLI

01 Run describe-reserved-instances command (OSX/Linux/UNIX) using predefined query filters to list the IDs of all failed EC2 RI 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 the requested RI IDs if there are failed purchases available within the selected AWS region or an empty table if there are no failed EC2 reservations: 

----------------------------------------
|        ReservedInstancesIds          |
+--------------------------------------+
| e2820a93-422a-b61d-af5b-29ab75e0925c |
| ca319d40-b59a-c706-8129-c214bde95a93 |
+--------------------------------------+

If the returned table contains one or more EC2 RI IDs, there are failed Reserved Instance(s) purchases within your AWS account, therefore you must retry your failed RI(s) payment by contacting Amazon Support Center.

03 Change the AWS region by updating the --region command parameter value and repeat step no. 1 and 2 to perform the entire process for other regions.

Remediation / Resolution

To mitigate unsuccessful AWS EC2 reservations you need to retry your failed EC2 Reserved Instance(s) payment by contacting Amazon Web Services. To create the necessary case through the AWS Support Center, perform the following:

Note 1: Failed AWS EC2 Reserved Instance (RI) purchases from previous billing periods cannot be retried.
Note 2: Requesting Amazon to retry your failed EC2 Reserved Instance(s) payment using AWS Billing and Cost Management console or AWS API via Command Line Interface (CLI) is not currently supported.

Using AWS Console

01 Sign in to the AWS Management Console.

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

03 On Support Center page, click Create case to initiate the process.

04 On the Create Case page, perform the following:

  1. Under Regarding, select Account and Billing Support option.
  2. Choose Billing from the Service dropdown list to send your request to AWS Billing and Cost Management service.
  3. Select Reserved Instances from the Category dropdown list.
  4. Inside the Subject box, enter a subject for your request such as "Retry failed EC2 Reserved Instance payment".
  5. Within Description textbox, enter a small description for your request so that AWS support can evaluate your request accordingly.
  6. Under Contact method, select a preferred contact method that AWS support team can use to respond to your request. If your need is urgent, choose Phone as contact method to request a direct phone call.
  7. Click Submit to send the payment retry request for your EC2 Reserved Instance(s) to AWS. A customer support representative will contact you shortly.

References

Publication date Mar 7, 2017

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You are auditing:

EC2 Reserved Instance Payment Failed

Risk level: High