While its broad selection of capabilities is often the first selling point that comes up during industry discussions, the credit for Amazon Inc.’s massive success in the public cloud is split equally with its accommodative business model. The company has been consciously working to preserve its edge on that front by providing increasingly convenient purchasing options for customers, the newest of which arrived this week in the form of Scheduled Reserved Instances.

The addition makes it possible to rent infrastructure at its data centers for the specific periods of time in which a particular workload has to run. For example, an animation studio that renders video content after work hours could configure its Scheduled Reserved Instances to come online only during nighttime and on weekends. Amazon chief cloud evangelist Jeff Barr said in a blog post that organizations can activate their implementations for as little as a few hours per month if operational demands so require.

The new option offers a compromise between the company’s most popular on-demand purchase plan, which provides the ability to adjust the size of a deployment at any time in exchange for a substantial premium, and its long-term instances. The latter are up to 75 percent cheaper in comparison but require buying either a full year or three years’ worth of usage. Such a large investment is difficult to justify when a workload is only expected to run for a fraction of that duration.

Scheduled Reserved Instances allow organizations to avoid committing themselves to a major infrastructure purchase and still take advantage of their predictable workload requirements in order to receive a discount. Hardware rented under the plan costs either five or ten percent less than its on-demand equivalent depending on whether it’s used during the peak hours of the host data center. The option is available at Amazon’s Virginia, Oregon and Ireland facilities on launch.

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