Cloud computing capacity purchased in advance at discounted rates in exchange for a commitment period (1-3 years). Like signing a long-term lease for lower monthly rent.
A company commits to reserved instances for their production databases, saving 40% compared to on-demand pricing over three years.
All four offer discounted pricing in exchange for committing to a consistent level of compute usage for a term (typically 1 or 3 years). AWS/Azure/OCI are commonly framed as reserving instance/VM capacity (with different scopes and flexibility options), while GCP primarily provides commitment-based discounts (CUDs) applied to eligible usage.