> There is no "shifting the risk", it's explicitly the reason for the discount. Sure there is. I'm not going to get into potential motivations and logistics (s

> There is no "shifting the risk", it's explicitly the reason for the discount. Sure there is. I'm not going to get into potential motivations and logistics (since I as a customer don't care), but there is no doubt that reservations are for shifting risk to the customer and away from Amazon. It doesn't matter if they're offering a discount, that's really not the point I am trying to make. I'm more concerned with the "risk" I take on each time I reserve an instance. The big gripe I have is that a reservation is made with the assumption that everything (quality of service, the needs of your application, customer service) stays roughly the same for the duration of the reservation. If the customer service stinks, or there are some really bad outages, I've sunk the cost and end up throwing the money away if I switch (we eat the expense instead of Amazon). If I want to upgrade my instance size and have mixed duration reservations, I've got that sunk cost to swallow. If I want to scale down, ditto. I risk throwing away money if I change plans. In a perfect world, I'd like the option to either pay an upfront reservation fee for the best rates, or run On Demand and get a graduated discount curve like Google Compute. They'd still get have an incentive to stay put, and people or companies with lower budgets could avoid the large reservation fees. At the same time, you could still pay the upfront reservation fee if you wanted the best rate and didn't mind committing for a year+.