IFO4
Loading...A pre-purchased commitment to a defined unit of compute, database, or other infrastructure capacity over a fixed term, typically one or three years, in exchange for a discount against on-demand pricing. The reserved instance is a financial instrument first and a technical artefact second. Federation members must treat the reserved instance as a balance-sheet position with a known maturity and a known break-even utilisation, not as a discount switch. Reserved instances purchased without a documented utilisation forecast are reported as financial findings under UFMS-001:2.4(d).
Term introduced by Amazon Web Services in 2009 to describe the original three-year EC2 commitment product; subsequently adopted across the major cloud providers.
Federation accreditation evidence must include a reserved-instance utilisation series at the same cadence as showback. A utilisation rate below seventy percent over the trailing ninety days is a finding subject to remediation under MEV-Annex:3.2.
@misc{ifo4_glossary_reserved_instance,
title = {{Reserved Instance}},
author = {{IFO4 Federation Editorial Board}},
howpublished = {{IFO4 Federation Glossary, slug \texttt{reserved-instance}}},
year = {2026},
url = {https://ifo4.org/glossary/reserved-instance},
note = {Category: FinOps; key: ReservedInstance}
}Federation members and accredited practitioners may challenge any entry under TGS-002:1.7. Filed challenges are routed to the editorial board, triaged into the revision register, and resolved in writing on the public docket. The slug remains stable through any revision.