> Actually, you can upgrade reservations as long as they are on the same machine type, so m3.large -> m3.xlarge -> m3.large is possible mid-year. m1 -> m3 is ce

> Actually, you can upgrade reservations as long as they are on the same machine type, so m3.large -> m3.xlarge -> m3.large is possible mid-year. m1 -> m3 is certainly a problem, but that shouldn't happen too often. There are a lot of caveats to this. Most importantly, you had to have purchased the reservations that you are going to combine at the same time. You can't mix and match durations. If you have one with 8 months left and another wix 6 months left, you're out of luck. So if you want this kind of thing, you've got to shell out a lot more at the same time to buy a group of reservations. That's kind of a pain to me. > One solution would be to reserve compute units, instead of machines. You could reserve 16 m3 "units" and could use that as 4 x m3.large or 2 x m3.xlarge. Those are equivalent in hardware anyway (minus some fragmentation). The fact that we're sitting here talking about making a huge investment that we may or may not end up using effectively is the thing I dislike about this reservation system. I'm going to have to shell out a good bit of coin upfront for all of this, and I am effectively locked in for at least a year. Unless I want to gamble on the reservation market. This is my biggest gripe, as an AWS customer. Give me more simple billing and get out of my way. Don't lock me into this thing that resembles a contract with a cancellation fee.