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Reserved Instance Payment Pending Purchases

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Risk Level: High (not acceptable risk)
Rule ID: EC2-051

Identify any pending Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance purchases available within your AWS account and follow Trend Cloud One™ – Conformity guidelines for remediation in order to receive a significant discount on the hourly charges. A payment-pending Reserved Instance 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 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.

Cost
optimisation

Amazon 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 Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance purchases available within your AWS cloud account, perform the following operations:

Using AWS Console

01 Sign in to the AWS Management Console.

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

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

04 Click inside the Filter by attributes or search by keyword box located under Reserved Instances, choose State, select Equals from Operators, and choose Payment pending to return only the incomplete Amazon EC2 reservation purchases available within the current AWS cloud region. If the Amazon EC2 console returns one or more Reserved Instances (RIs), the purchase payment for the returned Reserved Instances was not fully processed, therefore, you must take action and retry your pending reservation payment by contacting AWS Support Center.

05 Change the AWS cloud region from the console navigation bar and repeat the Audit process for other regions.

Using AWS CLI

01 Run describe-instances command (OSX/Linux/UNIX) with predefined and custom query filters to list the IDs of the incomplete Amazon EC2 reservation purchases available in the selected AWS cloud region: 

aws ec2 describe-reserved-instances
	--region us-east-1
	--filters "Name=state,Values=payment-pending"
	--output table
	--query 'ReservedInstances[*].ReservedInstancesId'

02 The command output should return a table with Reserved Instance IDs if there are reservation purchases that were not fully processed within the selected AWS cloud region or an empty table if there are no failed Amazon EC2 reservations: 

----------------------------------------
|        ReservedInstancesIds          |
+--------------------------------------+
| abcdabcd-1234-abcd-1234-abcd1234abcd |
| 12341234-abcd-1234-abcd-1234abcd1234 |
----------------------------------------

If the describe-instances command output returns one or more reservation IDs, there are incomplete Reserved Instance (RI) purchases available in the selected AWS cloud region, therefore, you must take action and retry your pending reservation payment by contacting AWS Support Center.

03 Change the AWS cloud region by updating the --region command parameter value and repeat the Audit process for other regions.

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 reservation types, your Reserved Instance purchases can't be confirmed and Amazon set their status to "payment-pending". To mitigate incomplete Amazon EC2 reservations, you must retry the pending reservation payments by contacting Amazon Web Services. To create a support case for pending reservation payments, perform the following operations:

Note: Creating a support case to request to retry your incomplete Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance payments using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) is not currently supported.

Using AWS Console

01 Sign in to the AWS Management Console.

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

03 In the left navigation panel, under Support Center, choose Your support cases.

04 Choose Create case and perform the following actions to create a support case to retry incomplete RI payments:

  1. For How can we help?, provide the following information:
    1. Choose Account and billing for the support case type.
    2. For Service, select Account.
    3. For Category, choose Other Account Issues.
    4. For Severity, select General question.
    5. Choose Next step: Additional information.
  2. For Additional information, provide the following information:
    1. Choose your preferred contact language from the Preferred contact language dropdown list.
    2. For Subject, provide the support request subject, such as Retry pending payments for Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances.
    3. For Description, provide a concise description of the issue and include the reservation ID(s) for the Reserved Instance(s) that you want to discuss. This will help the AWS support team to evaluate your request.
    4. Choose Next step: Solve now or contact us.
  3. For Solve now or contact us, select the Contact us tab, and choose a preferred contact method that AWS support team can use to respond to your request.
  4. Choose Submit to send your request to Amazon Web Services (AWS). A customer support representative should contact you shortly.

References

Publication date Mar 7, 2017

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