What Is PURI NURI AURI?

We’ll bet that if you’re reading this article, you either thought the headline was nuts or you read the term(s) somewhere and googled to find out what it means. Welcome to our cloud, where we frequently teach cloud computing concepts related to cloud economics. PURI NURI AURI are just that: ways to structure your cloud account to minimize expenses.

As we wrote before, with AWS reserved instances (RI), you pre-pay for a commitment to use an Amazon Elastic Compute (EC2) or Relational Database Service (RDS) instance for a 12 or 36 month term. In exchange, AWS discounts the price of the RI (up to 75%) as compared to regular On-Demand services. Reserved instances are ideal for applications that have a steady state and predictable usage patterns.

You can choose to pay for reserved instances in one of three ways:

PURI: Partial Upfront Reserved Instance

At the start of the term, you pay a portion of the RI’s cost and the remaining hours in the term are billed at a discounted hourly rate, regardless of whether the Reserved Instance is being used.

NURI: No Upfront Reserved Instance

Without paying ahead, you are billed a discounted hourly rate for every hour within the term, regardless of whether the Reserved Instance is being used.

AURI: All Upfront Reserved Instance

At the start of the term, you pay in full, with no other costs or additional hourly charges incurred for the remainder of the term, regardless of hours used.