If you’re an Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) cloud administrator and you’re ready for more commitment than the standard pay-as-you-go model, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is now offering Reserved Database Instances, giving the option to pre-pay for the server time you (or your customers) plan to use.

The Reserved Database Instances, according to the AWS blog entry, work exactly the same as any other from Amazon RDS. The difference is that customers can choose a term of one or three years and pre-pay, which they say gives a significant discount over the usual hourly rate.

On the one hand, Amazon Web Services usually loves to tout their pay-as-you-go model, so this is a break from type. On the other hand, if you know you’re going to use plenty of server time, pre-paying for RDS is a no-brainer.

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