Identify any pending Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance (RI) purchases available within your AWS account and follow Cloud Conformity guidelines for remediation in order to receive a significant discount on the hourly charges. A payment-pending EC2 RI purchase is a reservation purchase that can't be fully processed due to issues with the payment method used by the AWS user, 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 EC2 RI purchase (i.e. where the reservation status changes from 'payment-pending' to 'active' in a timely manner).
This rule can help you with the following compliance standards:
- APRA
- MAS
- AWAF
For further details on compliance standards supported by Conformity, see here.
This rule resolution is part of the Conformity Security & Compliance tool for AWS.
optimisation
EC2 Reserved Instances represent an efficient strategy to cut down on AWS costs. However, to receive the billing discount benefit promoted by Amazon, you need to make sure that all your EC2 reservation purchases have been fully processed (i.e. successfully confirmed by AWS) and none of them remained in the "payment-pending" state.
Audit
To identify any pending EC2 RI purchases available within your AWS account, perform the following:
Remediation / Resolution
Partial Upfront and All Upfront Reserved Instance types require an upfront payment. When the issuing institution of your payment method is rejecting the upfront payment required for Partial Upfront or All Upfront RI types requests, your reservation purchases can’t be confirmed and Amazon set their status to "payment-pending", hence these purchases remain unprocessed. To mitigate incomplete AWS EC2 reservations you need to retry these Reserved Instance(s) payments by contacting Amazon Web Services. To create the necessary case through the AWS Support Center, perform the following actions:
Note: Requesting Amazon to retry your pending EC2 Reserved Instance(s) payments using AWS Billing and Cost Management console or AWS API via Command Line Interface (CLI) is not currently supported.References
- AWS Documentation
- Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances
- How Reserved Instances Work
- Billing Benefits and Payment Options
- How do I retry a failed Reserved Instance payment?
- AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) Documentation
- ec2
- describe-reserved-instances
Unlock the Remediation Steps
Free 30-day Trial
Automatically audit your configurations with Conformity
and gain access to our cloud security platform.

You are auditing:
EC2 Reserved Instance Payment Pending
Risk level: High