[QuinnyPig]

With a couple of exceptions, 3 year RIs are a poor move.

You're locking in pricing, and opting out of both newer instance classes and future price reductions during that time period.

Generally, they're only useful for "that database we WILL NEVER MOVE," or if you're writing portions of your cloud spend as CapEx and want to amortize depreciation.

[sly010]

I agree on AWS it's a hard move. On GCE, however, you would be buying CPU and memory units, not machines, which to me is much more appealing. Even if the the price drops 50% every year, i would break even.