Use the Conformity Knowledge Base AI to help improve your Cloud Posture

ElastiCache Reserved Cache Node Payment Pending

Trend Micro Cloud One™ – Conformity is a continuous assurance tool that provides peace of mind for your cloud infrastructure, delivering over 750 automated best practice checks.

Risk Level: High (not acceptable risk)
Rule ID: EC-007

Identify any pending ElastiCache Reserved Cache Nodes (RCNs) available within your AWS account and follow Cloud Conformity instructions for remediation in order to enable discounted hourly rates for your cache nodes in exchange of reserving a certain amount of compute usage upfront. A payment-pending ElastiCache RCN purchase is a reservation purchase that can`t be fully processed due to issues with the payment method utilized, that maintains the "payment-pending" status long after the initial purchase attempt - not to be confused with the pending state temporarily installed during a successfully processed ElastiCache RCN purchase (i.e. where the reservation status changes from "payment-pending" to "active" within a few minutes).

This rule can help you work with the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

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

Cost
optimisation

The cost savings when using ElastiCache Reserved Cache Nodes over standard On-Demand Cache Nodes are up to 70% when used in steady state, therefore in order to receive this discount benefit you need to make sure that all your ElastiCache reservation purchases have been fully processed (i.e. the payment has been successfully confirmed).


Audit

To identify any pending ElastiCache RCN purchases available in your AWS account, perform the following actions:

Using AWS Console

01 Login to the AWS Management Console.

02 Navigate to ElastiCache dashboard at https://console.aws.amazon.com/elasticache/.

03 In the left navigation panel, under ElastiCache Dashboard, click Reserved Nodes.

04 Open the dashboard Show/Hide Columns dialog box by clicking the configuration icon from the right menu:

Show/Hide Columns

05 Inside the Show/Hide Columns dialog box, select Status checkbox:

Status

then click Save to apply the changes.

06 On the Reserved Cache Nodes listing page, check the status value displayed for each RCN within the Status column to determine the reservation current status. If one or more ElastiCache RCNs have the current status set to payment-pending, the purchase payment for the selected Reserved Node(s) is pending (i.e. not confirmed), therefore you need to retry your failed reservation(s) payment by contacting AWS Support Center.

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

Using AWS CLI

01 Run describe-reserved-cache-nodes command (OSX/Linux/UNIX) using custom query filters to list the unique identifiers of all ElastiCache RCNs purchased in the selected AWS region:

aws elasticache describe-reserved-cache-nodes
    --region us-east-1
    --output table
    --query 'ReservedCacheNodes[*].ReservedCacheNodeId'

02 The command output should return a table with the requested RCN identifiers:

------------------------
| ReservedCacheNodeIds |
+----------------------+
| redis-webcache-rcn-1 |
| redis-webcache-rcn-2 |
+----------------------+

03 Run again describe-reserved-cache-nodes command (OSX/Linux/UNIX) using your Amazon ElastiCache RCN name returned at the previous step as identifier and apply custom query filtering to describe the purchase status for the selected Reserved Cache Node:

aws elasticache describe-reserved-cache-nodes
    --region us-east-1
    --reserved-cache-node-id redis-webcache-rcn-1
    --query 'ReservedCacheNodes[*].State'

04 The command output should return the requested RCN purchase current status:

[
    "payment-pending"
]

If the status value returned by the command output is "payment-pending", the selected ElastiCache Reserved Cache Node purchase is pending, therefore you must retry your pending RCN(s) payment by opening a support case using AWS Support Center (For more information see Remediation/Resolution section).

05 Change the AWS region by updating the --region command parameter value and repeat steps no. 1 – 4 to perform the entire process for other regions.

Remediation / Resolution

Partial Upfront and All Upfront Reserved Nodes types require an upfront payment. Usually when the issuing institution of your payment method is rejecting the upfront payment required for Partial Upfront or All Upfront RN types requests, your reservation purchases are not fully processed and confirmed by Amazon, therefore their status is set to "payment-pending". To fix unprocessed ElastiCache reservations you need to retry the RCN(s) purchase payments by contacting AWS. To create the required support case using AWS Support Center console, perform the following:

Note: Requesting Amazon to retry your pending ElastiCache RCN(s) payments 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 button to initiate the support case request.

04 On the Create Case page, perform the following actions:

  1. Under Regarding, select Account and Billing Support option.
  2. Choose Billing from the Service dropdown list to send your request to AWS Billing department.
  3. Select Reserved Instances from the Category dropdown list.
  4. Inside the Subject box, provide a subject for your request such as "Retry ElastiCache Reserved Cache Node pending payment".
  5. Within Description textbox, enter a small description for your request so that AWS support can evaluate properly your request.
  6. Under Contact method, select a preferred contact method that AWS support team can use to respond to your request.
  7. Click Submit to send the payment retry request for your ElastiCache Reserved Cache Node(s) to AWS. A customer support representative will contact you shortly.

References

Publication date Mar 7, 2017

Unlock the Remediation Steps


Free 30-day Trial

Automatically audit your configurations with Conformity
and gain access to our cloud security platform.

Confirmity Cloud Platform

No thanks, back to article

You are auditing:

ElastiCache Reserved Cache Node Payment Pending

Risk Level: High