7 ms·

Announcing Micro Instances for Amazon EC2

290 points by bpuvanathasan 16y ago

muyyatin 16y ago
For approximately a quarter of the cost of small instances. This may cut away at the incentive for people to start with Google App Engine.
- pwpwp 16y ago
  Hm... I don't see AWS and GAE playing in the same ballpark at the moment. I'm sure AWS will continue to increase the convenience and ease-of-use of their services, and GAE will continue to increase the breadth of their services, but right now they seem to be targetted at quite different app-dev areas.
- chrisboesing 16y ago
  That is exactly the position I'm in right now. Was going to use GAE but now I'm rethinking that decision. A micro instance of their relational database service would be perfect for my use, but I guess the ram would be too small.
bkrausz 16y ago
About time...at $15/mo these are now a viable competitor to generic VPSes.
- staunch 16y ago
  $0.03 * 24 * 30 = $21/mo?
  - _delirium 16y ago
    The Linux instances are $0.02/hr.
    - staunch 16y ago
      Ah, yes. Thanks.
  - caudicus 16y ago
    Reserved instances (assuming you're going to use it for the full year, which of course is the big caveat) also bring the cost down to $0.007 an hour with an up-front investment of $54, so: (($0.007 * 24 * 30)*12 + 54)/12 = $9.54 a month assuming you use it for the full year. Edit: Also, as mentioned by _delirium, Linux instances are also $0.02 an hour. I did the Linux calculation but the same one with Windows goes at $0.012 per hour.
- binomial 16y ago
  Except that you have to pay separately for storage, as you have to use EBS: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#instance http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#instance
  - cperciva 16y ago
    A comparable generic VPS might have 10-20 GB of storage, which only adds $1-2 to the monthly cost.
    - _delirium 16y ago
      Yeah, the storage doesn't seem like a huge deal, but the bandwidth might be. A $12/mo VPS from prgmr.com gives you 80 gigs/month free transfer, which Amazon would charge you another $12 for.
      - cperciva 16y ago
        If you try to construct a standard VPS or dedicated server plan out of EC2, you're always going to find that the bandwidth makes EC2 more expensive -- but that ignores the fact that most people don't even come close to using all their allocated bandwidth. The fact that AWS only charges for actual bandwidth used makes a big difference. (The same applies with Tarsnap's $0.30/GB storage cost vs. fixed-plan backup pricing -- $10 for 50 GB sounds cheaper, but if people only use 5 GB of that on average, it turns out to be far more expensive.)
      - rbranson 16y ago
        Perhaps you don't understand. This is EC2 we're talking about, not prgmr. People run massive production websites on EC2 because it is reliable, predictable, and secure. It provides features that allow you to recover from outages and failures. For instance, being able to periodically snapshot your EBS volume to S3 and recover from a total datacenter failure within a few minutes by reconstituting the volume in a separate datacenter. However, this just scratches the surface on what AWS offers over a traditional VPS provider.
- MichaelApproved 16y ago
  Don't forget that static IP is extra. All bandwidth is extra. Memory is at a fixed limit (some VPS will let you burst above your assigned memory). No software like Plesk to help configure the box. Those things can add up. Edit 1: I mistakenly said that static IP was extra when it's not while in use. Edit 2: Storage is also extra.
  - bkrausz 16y ago
    Static IPs only cost money if you're not using them. For most small VPSes utilization is practically nothing. I'm not saying it will replace VPSes, but it's a valid competitor.
- siong1987 16y ago
  and, a reserved instance only costs about $10/mo.
raghus 16y ago
IIRC Jeff Bezos hinted at this when he spoke at Startup School a couple years ago
- dfranke 16y ago
  He did, in reply to my question about whether it would ever happen. Now that it finally has, I'll be migrating over to EC2 shortly :-)
  - listic 16y ago
    What exactly makes you migrate to EC2? It doesn't look cheaper or more reliable than VPS from a solid provider. To be better positioned for rapid growth in the future?
    - dfranke 16y ago
      Primarily, the fact that Amazon really has its act together with respect to security. That silly HMAC canonicalization bug notwithstanding, they've made a whole lot of good design decisions. I currently use Linode. A year ago, I reported two vulnerabilities in their control panel to them, both elementary in nature, one of them with a PoC exploit. Last I checked, neither has been fixed.
johns 16y ago
Maybe not as huge a deal for Linux instances, but this is HUGE for Windows users. There's nothing comparable elsewhere. The cheapest Rackspace Cloud instance is $0.08/hour for 1GB. There is no faster, cheaper way to spin up a Windows server than AWS now.
- brc 16y ago
  Yes but 600mb on a windows server doesn't give you a lot of room to play with. I'm struggling to think of a use-case but I'm sure there are many.
  - johns 16y ago
    Yeah, they're not going to run SQL Server. It's plenty for just serving up some simple stuff. I use the small instances mostly for testing stuff out with different configurations and running small short-term side projects. These will work perfectly for that.
    - swombat 16y ago
      Do those have VNC support, though? Could you pay $14 and have a remote IE instance that the whole team can access no matter where they are, instead of using up your precious local memory on every machine?
      - johns 16y ago
        They support Remote Desktop, but since they're Server 2008 the only IE instance you could run on it is IE8.
        eli 16y ago
        You could probably use one of the hacky solutions like IETester (http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage) for older versions. I'd much rather run IE locally in a VM though.
      - 16y ago
PStamatiou 16y ago
Hrm I don't see the option? http://cl.ly/0430c3a3f00c59743368 http://cl.ly/0430c3a3f00c59743368 edit: only appears to be available with certain AMIs
- spahl 16y ago
  It only works with EBS backed AMIs.
dawson 16y ago
Can you use Microsoft SQL Server with Micro On-Demand Instances? The pricing doesn't offer a Windows and SQL Server Usage costing. http://aws.amazon.com/windows/ http://aws.amazon.com/windows/
- johns 16y ago
  You probably could, but that's not really enough RAM to do anything worthwhile with SQL Server. And you'd have to install it yourself it appears.
- mjallday 16y ago
  The best option if you wanted to do this would be to install SQL Server Express since you're not going anywhere near the memory limit of 4 gig that that product is bound by. That way you're not going to incur any licensing cost for SQL Server provided you can live with the DB having a file size limit of 4 gig.
  - azeroz 16y ago
    Tried it with SQL Server Express on Server 2008, pushed RAM usage right up to ~530/613 MB before even starting SQL Server. Regardless, I'm glad to see the offering. Was looking for something similar and with the bar of entry constantly getting lower by competition rising, am sure it'll find a niche.
    - astrodust 16y ago
      For crappy PHP blog hosting, it's a pretty good deal compared to "shared" hosting where you take your chances.
mattjung 16y ago
Seems that EC2 feels some competitive pressure...Yet a big move that kills the (superficial) cost-argument against the Amazon offer.
- swombat 16y ago
  I don't think that argument is superficial. At scale, Amazon is actually quite pricey. Currently, Amazon makes most sense if your site does have large variability in usage and if it makes use of the ability to spin up/down instances on demand. If you're an event-related site where usage goes up by a factor of 10-100 for a few hours every week, for example, Amazon makes a whole lot of sense. However, if your usage is way up there all week long, it seems to me there are significantly cheaper alternatives, e.g. Hetzner servers.
  - jread 16y ago
    One of the biggest advantages to using EC2 is its scaling capabilities. EC2 offers 10 different instance sizes from m1.small to cc.4xlarge (with 10 Gbps clustering capabilities), 4 different regions, auto-scaling, load balancing, high availability via off-instance storage, durability via copying, GigE uplinks, and much more. You can't get that level of features from in any other IaaS cloud I am aware of. Yes, you might pay more than co-locating yourself or leasing some dedicated servers... but that isn't exactly an apples to apples comparison to EC2.
  - rbranson 16y ago
    Do you have a testing environment or multiple testing environments? Does it/Do they need to run all the time? If not, you save there. Do you like being able to spin up an entire duplicate of your environment to do environmental tests? You can't do that in normal server environments without ridiculous expenditure.
alex1 16y ago
It doesn't seem to be up on the pricing page yet (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/). Are 32-bit and 64-bit the same price?
- johns 16y ago
  http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing is where I see it now. I can't find anything that would indicate different prices for 32- or 64-bit.
madewulf 16y ago
It seems there is no local storage included in the price. I did not try, but that probably means complicated settings, which is a pity, since while the price could probably appeal to people launching side projects at minimal costs, like me, being a side project also means that not much time can be devoted to sysadminery.
- johns 16y ago
  Go to the AWS console and launch one. It's pretty much as simple as it can be. They automatically use EBS so they're persistent. No special configuration required.
  - madewulf 16y ago
    Then it is really interesting. I have a few possible use cases in mind : - we are hosting a little software load balancer for web services and it definitely does not need more than that - thanks to the web service api of Amazon, it is relatively easy to set automated recovery plans, and the idea is very attractive, but until now I was detterred by the price. - for small web applications with low bandwith, the price is good. For reserved instances, for one year, you pay 54$ up front, then 87.6$ for usage for the whole year, for a total of 141.6. That's a lot less than renting a server at linode.com for a year (~220$).
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
drtse4 16y ago
If you book a reserved instance, the price for lnx get as low as $0.01 ($54/yr). It's a bit premature but for spot instances, atm windows ones are around $0.0135 (linux history is not yet available). As for other instance-types it looks like that with spot instances you'll get the usual 60% off the original price. EDIT: $54 upfront and then $0.01
- mrb 16y ago
  $0.01/hr is $88/yr
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
aneth 16y ago
I'm an AWS user, and I also use Rackspace some, so interesting to find this article indicating you're better off with a small Rackspace instance than a medium AWS instance. http://www.thebitsource.com/featured-posts/rackspace-cloud-servers-versus-amazon-ec2-performance-analysis/ http://www.thebitsource.com/featured-posts/rackspace-cloud-s...
- jread 16y ago
  This study was sponsored by Rackspace... I think the end results are questionable. Here is a study I wrote comparing AWS, Rackspace and some other cloud providers using some more standard benchmarking methods: http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchmarking-in-cloud.html http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchma...
forkqueue 16y ago
Anyone got any ideas why the strangely specific size of 613MB RAM?
- mrb 16y ago
  Sure. They probably followed a similar reasoning (example with fictional numbers, but probably close to reality): * They have 64GB RAM hosts. * They want to dedicate only up to 85% of the RAM to the Xen instances (keep 15% for the host OS, buffercache, etc). * The Operations/Management team decides to target an overall rate of $1.82/hr per host to achieve desirable profits. * The AWS marketing department has a requirement that instances be priced $.xx/hr (no fractional cents) to evoke "simplicity". * At a first pricing attempt, they see they have the choice of charging $.02/hr and assigning 65536 * .85 / (1.82 / .02) = 612MB per instance * ...or charging $.03/hr and assigning 65536 * 0.85 / (1.82 / .03) = 918MB per instance * They select the first option (612MB/instance) because it is deemed sufficiently smaller than the existing "small" 1.7GB instance offering, whereas 918MB was not small enough.
  - miyabo 16y ago
    I believe they're using chunks of RAM on each physical server to hold S3 objects. This might help explain where the "buffer/cache" is going to.
    - astrodust 16y ago
      That makes almost no sense. S3 is a purely network based file delivery service over HTTP, and pre-dates EC2 by a significant amount of time. A Xen supervisor needs a fair amount of memory for its own operations, plus it can buffer the physical disks in the machine as well as any network attached storage. If these servers were also hosting S3 in their "spare time" it would degrade performance, and expose the system to potential vulnerabilities.
fierarul 16y ago
This might just make me replace the Slicehost instance I use for Mercurial and build server. Elastic IP + EBS + micro instance makes a pretty nice low level machine. It always bothered me that for a development server you are basically overpaying for bandwidth. Who cares I have 450GB bandwidth when I use maybe 30GB per month ?
- YooLi 16y ago
  Try Rackspace Cloud Servers (Rackspace owns Slicehost too). Pretty much the same configs as slicehost except no bundled bandwidth so you only pay $11 a month. No affiliation to them but I do have VPSs at both (slicehost for things that require lots of bandwidth).
  - fierarul 16y ago
    Yeah, I thought about that too, but apparently there is no way to migrate data (a slice) from Slicehost to Rackspace automatically. And if I have to do it myself I might as well use Amazon, I use it for everything else anyhow.
mrb 16y ago
I notice that, in a sense, AWS proves that the Total Cost of Ownership of Windows infrastructures is higher than the TCO of Linux infrastructures. Amazon charges more for Windows instances across their entire offering. A Windows micro instance costs 50% more than a Linux micro instance ($.03/hr vs $.02/hr). This likely reflects Amazon's statistical studies on their EC2 datacenters that a Windows stack (OS + apps) uses on average more resources than a Linux stack, therefore more power costs, cooling costs, etc.
- lars512 16y ago
  I imagine the price difference also relates to licensing costs for Windows instances. Also, TCO is more than just compute efficiency, although the latter is important in its own right.
- mellampudi 16y ago
  Who said amazon charges according to what is costs them ? Infact, I CAN say, that, according to the market, windows is better than linux and hence amazon is charging more for windows machines.
  - YooLi 16y ago
    What mythical market are you referring to?
- jasonkester 16y ago
  It proves the part that wasn't in dispute. That is, that free software costs less to purchase than licensed software. The TCO debate centers around the labor required to set up & maintain one versus the other. That, incidentally, is why I run Windows on all my EC2 boxes.
andrevoget 16y ago
The spot prices are very low for the new Micro Instances. For Linux servers they are currently at $0.007/hour (about $5/month).
- jread 16y ago
  A good strategy I've used with EC2 for the past 6 months is to always purchase spot instances using a bid price that is just slightly above the on-demand price. Generally spot pricing stays around the much lower reserve pricing but will occasionally spike. By doing this, you basically get reserve pricing without having to pay the upfront reserve fee, and can keep your spot instance online long term. This site provides some useful historical data on spot pricing: http://cloudexchange.org http://cloudexchange.org
  - grep 16y ago
    Can you keep your spot instance up 24/7?
    - gxti 16y ago
      No, spot instances can be shut down anytime you are outbid.
      - tibbon 16y ago
        However, they can be great to help fill out your server cluster with things that don't always need to stay up (like Mongel servers). Buy some reserved instances, then put out several spot bids as well for things you can load balance to.
        bdonlan 16y ago
        That said, keep in mind that if you need to keep at least one instance up, you need to put them in multiple availability zones, or vary the max spot prices - if there's a load spike that leads to your spot instances being terminated, it'll likely hit all of the spot instances at a given price in the same AZ.
jread 16y ago
Here is a Geekbench benchmark report for one of these new micro instances: http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=287891 http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=287891 . It uses the same E5430 processors as the other m1 instances. CPU performance is about 2x m1.small based on these m1.small Geekbench results: http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=241412 http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=241412 and comparable to a rackspace 4GB server I also benchmarked: http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=243138 http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=243138.
- drtse4 16y ago
  Lower total score (higher fp, lower everything else) if your instance has an older Opteron 2218HE (us-east-1b) http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=287900 http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=287900
  - jread 16y ago
    To my knowledge (I've spun up many EC2 m1.small instances in all 4 regions), Opteron 2218s are only in use in us-east. The other 3 regions use E5430s.
- _delirium 16y ago
  That CPU performance is consistent with what they give as the burst performance: up to 2 EC2 Compute Units, which should be 2x as much as the small instances' 1 ECU. Would be interesting to know how often/long you can burst, and what the non-burst baseline is, though.
bravura 16y ago
Why is it not possible to get Small Standard instances with 64-bit architectures? This is the only instance that is missing 64-bit. Even Micro instances offer 64-bit.
- jread 16y ago
  c1.medium is also available only in 32-bit
simon_kun 16y ago
The real interest is in seeing what the downstream value added services do with this. For example, I'm interested to see what changes this makes to the Heroku offering. It seems to be a perfect fit for their product.
- grep 16y ago
  I hope EngineYard drop their prices a lot. I really want to use it but it's too expensive.
  - mayanks 16y ago
    Same here. I am sure EngineYard will use this opportunity to provide services on micro-instances. It's going to be a big boost to EngineYard. Heroku, not as much I guess since they anyway run multiple dynos on a single m/c.
10ren 16y ago
Aside: I looked into AWS a couple weeks ago, to play with a simple webapp idea, but the myriad choices, acronyms and signups confused me, and there was [seemed to be] no free options for getting started, and initial traction. It seems focussed on sophisticated enterprise users (nothing wrong with that). So, I went with google's App Engine, which was much simpler, and has been great. These micro-instances seem the same. Did I give up too soon?
- ryandvm 16y ago
  If you can make your app fit within the significant limitations of App Engine, then it is a great service. I've used it for several projects from basic CMS to AJAX chat. That said, sooner or later you'll want to do something that should seem possible on App Engine (e.g., image transformations with BufferedImage) and you'll hit a brick wall. That's when I turn to a generic Ubuntu image running on EC2. It's not free, but with spot pricing it's awfully cheap. I expect spot pricing for this newest micro size to stabilize at around $10 a month.
10ren 16y ago
Aside: How far off are we from renting our PCs in the cloud, and just having a local terminal? I know it's an old Failed Dream (mainframe-terminal, client-server, settop box etc), but maybe we're getting closer... It seems a bit ridiculous, because you still need a bit of local power for display and fast reactions, and current iPhones/netbooks could do with more power. But desktop PC's have been fast enough in that respect for a while. An advantage of the cloud is that as RAM, cycle prices etc drop, you get it (more of them or cheaper) without the hassle of physically upgrading. And bursty usage is available too, eg. when compiling. There's solid economics here: it's a sort of timesharing idea, instead of cycles being wasted while you type, someone else uses them to compile. Even more compelling globally - someone else uses them while you sleep. The same argument works for sharing your desktop's own cycles, p2p, but a centralized cloud has admin advantages and other economies of scale.
- tibbon 16y ago
  OnLive has gotten pretty close with their gaming platform. They've shown demos of Autocad software and I believe Photoshop running with it.
  - 10ren 16y ago
    OnLive sounds cool, but it's a little hard to believe, since latency is a common issue in regular gaming already. Demos are invariably carefully orchestrated. The other thing that gives me pause is that it is such a compelling vision for publishers. It's an absolutely magic idea. However, this enthusiasm is not technology-driven: it's not about what has become possible, but what would be really amazingly cool if it was possible. But latency isn't such an issue for compiling etc. Someone was saying in the instant google thread that 250ms is imperceptible for search (and I've heard 200ms for the command line, from Rob Pike on Go). That's much lower hanging fruit than for gaming, where 250ms latency is far from instant but unplayable.
    - rbranson 16y ago
      How is it hard to believe? They are essentially doing what Akamai did and locating server farms very "close" to end users on the network. I have a 20ms ping from the closest Akamai CDN server.
mr_luc 16y ago
$0.02/hr == approximately $14/mo if you leave it on. Is this really $6/mo cheaper than a linode 512? That might be nice for personal projects. I'm trying to teach myself some things that really need more than my local dev machine (puppet, backup strategies/more resilient code, learning cassandra). I've been running a bunch of VM's on my laptop, but my dev machine is a weakling and can't hardly handle it. It almost seems like I could just spin up a dozen of these little instances for $2.88 per waking day and teach myself under substantially more "real" conditions on the cheap. That's something I'd love to have as an option on linode, given that teaching myself is a large part of what I use it for. Is there any reason that wouldn't work? Is this too complicated in practice?
- tibbon 16y ago
  None that I can see. I'm going to buy one reserved one, even though I have 7 hardware servers. I need to get better with the platform and for $54/year, the price is right
- bdonlan 16y ago
  Remember, though, you still need to pay for EBS and bandwidth seperately.
  - mr_luc 16y ago
    Which should be pretty low if I'm the only user. Linode doesn't charge you for bandwidth between nodes in the same datacenter -- is there something comparable in the EC2 world?
    - pcarmichael 16y ago
      Yes, but only if the nodes are in the same region and availability zone. From amazon's pricing page [http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/]: There is no Data Transfer charge between Amazon EC2 and other Amazon Web Services within the same region (i.e. between Amazon EC2 US West and Amazon S3 in US West). Data transferred between Amazon EC2 instances located in different Availability Zones in the same Region will be charged Regional Data Transfer. Data transferred between AWS services in different regions will be charged as Internet Data Transfer on both sides of the transfer.
grep 16y ago
What can we conclude about the performance comparing with Linode and Slicehost smaller offers? I'm curious if anyone has any conclusions.
atomical 16y ago
I pay about $18 for hosting from a provider and get 500 gigs of transfer and 60 gigs of storage space. I was hoping this would be a real deal.
enko 16y ago
This is a big deal for us mongodb fans, who were bitten badly by the small instance's 32 bit limitation. Sign me up.
cschneid 16y ago
So how often do EC2 instances go down? Is it at hardware fail rate? or more often? Can I use this as a VPS replacement, and not have to worry about monitoring and fast restoration? (of non-important projects).
- mchadwick 16y ago
  We've been running hundreds of instances on EC2 for a couple years, and have never seen one just "go down." However, we will get notifications of "degraded instances." When an instance is degraded, you have some window (generally a couple days) to move the services running on that instance to another one. Even at the aforementioned scale, this happens maybe once every three to four months. Can you use this as a VPS replacement? Probably. My guess is that your uptime will be no worse than some VPS provider. However, if you're storing information on the ephemeral storage, the onus is on you to get it to the new instance. I imagine that isn't generally the case on a VPS. You may be able to mitigate this by using EBS (required in the case of these micro instances), but I've only used EBS a handful of times, and am no expert on the subject. If I understand their layout for these micro instances, it would simply be a matter of spinning up a new instance and spinning down the degraded node.
- mceachen 16y ago
  I think you'd need a pretty large sample set before you came to any reasonable conclusion. I've been running ~10 nodes for AdGrok for the last 3 months, and we've already had one node fail (in that it wouldn't respond to any ec2 cli command to shut down or even terminate). That hardware failure rate is about what I'd expect if it was our own colo and our own machines. Stuff always breaks.
- ary 16y ago
  It's difficult to say. I've worked at two companies that have used EC2 for various purposes. One had an instance that was used for dev work get "corrupted" on three separate occasions (I couldn't get the specifics, but there were definitely I/O issues with the instance storage), and the other has been using the same production box for more than a year. The bottom line is that EC2 installations need to be designed as semi-permanent. My preferred strategy is similar to how Google talks about their hardware (when they do), that any one server can go down at any time, but the overall setup is resilient to failure.
rbranson 16y ago
Now that there are very small instances with 64-bit support, these can form the basis of the ultimate incrementally scalable MongoDB cluster.
- mark_l_watson 16y ago
  My thought also, but be a little careful: you really want enough memory on mongod servers to keep the indices in memory.
  - rbranson 16y ago
    It's my understanding that the indices would be sharded as well, so wouldn't you be able to just fire up more instances if the indices started to approach some kind of 80% figure?
    - mark_l_watson 16y ago
      I think you are right, but I have never had to use sharding with MongoDB (yet)
psadauskas 16y ago
I put together a google spreadsheet of the EC2 instance pricing. US East / West only, so far. https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AtNTMtkGNKnfdGJoajFpdDNXUUxFX1BOd3Q3bzQ2bEE&hl=en https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AtNTMtkGNKnfdGJoajF... $10/mo for 1 year reserved is pretty amazing.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- jefft 16y ago
  don't forget the cost of the EBS volume. that'd be an extra $5/mo for 50GB of storage
  - psadauskas 16y ago
    Yes, you're correct. But its the same $5 no matter what instance size you use, which is what this spreadsheet is for. Also, on my small slicehost, I'm paying $20/mo for 1/3 the RAM, and using 6GB of disk, which would be $0.60 on EBS.
    - tomstuart 16y ago
      Well, you don't need the EBS volume on other instance sizes, because they have instance storage.
      - gokhan 16y ago
        Nothing durable, though.
  - astrodust 16y ago
    That's a lot cheaper than an extra 50GB on Linode.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
mceachen 16y ago
I've been using the high-cpu medium instances (c1.medium) for our rails nodes, just to avoid the slothy m1.small CPU. It seems like these are tailor-made for running either haproxy or your web tier!
cmelbye 16y ago
This is awesome, now it's super affordable for me to run beanstalkd and a few queue workers as necessary and communicate with my Heroku app over the Amazon private network.
rjurney 16y ago
Very impressed that these are available in 64 bit. That means that one OS image can scale from micro to ginormous. WIN.
jasonrowland 16y ago
The Amazon EC2 is sooo slow. I spun up an instance for Amazon and Rackspace both to see how long it would take to render a frame in Blender. It is shocking how slow the difference was. I didn't do an apples-to-apples comparison, but the Rackspace blender 64bit 2.49b rendered in 47 seconds. The Amazon linux blender 2.48 rendered in 17 minutes! http://www.jasonrowland.com/2010/09/amazon-vs-rackspace-for-blender/ http://www.jasonrowland.com/2010/09/amazon-vs-rackspace-for-...

290 points by bpuvanathasan 16y ago

For approximately a quarter of the cost of small instances. This may cut away at the incentive for people to start with Google App Engine.

pwpwp 16y ago
Hm... I don't see AWS and GAE playing in the same ballpark at the moment. I'm sure AWS will continue to increase the convenience and ease-of-use of their services, and GAE will continue to increase the breadth of their services, but right now they seem to be targetted at quite different app-dev areas.
chrisboesing 16y ago
That is exactly the position I'm in right now. Was going to use GAE but now I'm rethinking that decision. A micro instance of their relational database service would be perfect for my use, but I guess the ram would be too small.

bkrausz 16y ago

About time...at $15/mo these are now a viable competitor to generic VPSes.

staunch 16y ago
$0.03 * 24 * 30 = $21/mo?
- _delirium 16y ago
  The Linux instances are $0.02/hr.
  - staunch 16y ago
    Ah, yes. Thanks.
- caudicus 16y ago
  Reserved instances (assuming you're going to use it for the full year, which of course is the big caveat) also bring the cost down to $0.007 an hour with an up-front investment of $54, so: (($0.007 * 24 * 30)*12 + 54)/12 = $9.54 a month assuming you use it for the full year. Edit: Also, as mentioned by _delirium, Linux instances are also $0.02 an hour. I did the Linux calculation but the same one with Windows goes at $0.012 per hour.
binomial 16y ago
Except that you have to pay separately for storage, as you have to use EBS: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#instance http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#instance
- cperciva 16y ago
  A comparable generic VPS might have 10-20 GB of storage, which only adds $1-2 to the monthly cost.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    Yeah, the storage doesn't seem like a huge deal, but the bandwidth might be. A $12/mo VPS from prgmr.com gives you 80 gigs/month free transfer, which Amazon would charge you another $12 for.
    - cperciva 16y ago
      If you try to construct a standard VPS or dedicated server plan out of EC2, you're always going to find that the bandwidth makes EC2 more expensive -- but that ignores the fact that most people don't even come close to using all their allocated bandwidth. The fact that AWS only charges for actual bandwidth used makes a big difference. (The same applies with Tarsnap's $0.30/GB storage cost vs. fixed-plan backup pricing -- $10 for 50 GB sounds cheaper, but if people only use 5 GB of that on average, it turns out to be far more expensive.)
    - rbranson 16y ago
      Perhaps you don't understand. This is EC2 we're talking about, not prgmr. People run massive production websites on EC2 because it is reliable, predictable, and secure. It provides features that allow you to recover from outages and failures. For instance, being able to periodically snapshot your EBS volume to S3 and recover from a total datacenter failure within a few minutes by reconstituting the volume in a separate datacenter. However, this just scratches the surface on what AWS offers over a traditional VPS provider.
MichaelApproved 16y ago
Don't forget that static IP is extra. All bandwidth is extra. Memory is at a fixed limit (some VPS will let you burst above your assigned memory). No software like Plesk to help configure the box. Those things can add up. Edit 1: I mistakenly said that static IP was extra when it's not while in use. Edit 2: Storage is also extra.
- bkrausz 16y ago
  Static IPs only cost money if you're not using them. For most small VPSes utilization is practically nothing. I'm not saying it will replace VPSes, but it's a valid competitor.
siong1987 16y ago
and, a reserved instance only costs about $10/mo.

raghus 16y ago

IIRC Jeff Bezos hinted at this when he spoke at Startup School a couple years ago

dfranke 16y ago
He did, in reply to my question about whether it would ever happen. Now that it finally has, I'll be migrating over to EC2 shortly :-)
- listic 16y ago
  What exactly makes you migrate to EC2? It doesn't look cheaper or more reliable than VPS from a solid provider. To be better positioned for rapid growth in the future?
  - dfranke 16y ago
    Primarily, the fact that Amazon really has its act together with respect to security. That silly HMAC canonicalization bug notwithstanding, they've made a whole lot of good design decisions. I currently use Linode. A year ago, I reported two vulnerabilities in their control panel to them, both elementary in nature, one of them with a PoC exploit. Last I checked, neither has been fixed.

johns 16y ago

Maybe not as huge a deal for Linux instances, but this is HUGE for Windows users. There's nothing comparable elsewhere. The cheapest Rackspace Cloud instance is $0.08/hour for 1GB. There is no faster, cheaper way to spin up a Windows server than AWS now.

brc 16y ago
Yes but 600mb on a windows server doesn't give you a lot of room to play with. I'm struggling to think of a use-case but I'm sure there are many.
- johns 16y ago
  Yeah, they're not going to run SQL Server. It's plenty for just serving up some simple stuff. I use the small instances mostly for testing stuff out with different configurations and running small short-term side projects. These will work perfectly for that.
  - swombat 16y ago
    Do those have VNC support, though? Could you pay $14 and have a remote IE instance that the whole team can access no matter where they are, instead of using up your precious local memory on every machine?
    - johns 16y ago
      They support Remote Desktop, but since they're Server 2008 the only IE instance you could run on it is IE8.
      - eli 16y ago
        You could probably use one of the hacky solutions like IETester (http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage) for older versions. I'd much rather run IE locally in a VM though.
    - 16y ago

PStamatiou 16y ago

Hrm I don't see the option? http://cl.ly/0430c3a3f00c59743368 http://cl.ly/0430c3a3f00c59743368 edit: only appears to be available with certain AMIs

spahl 16y ago
It only works with EBS backed AMIs.

dawson 16y ago

Can you use Microsoft SQL Server with Micro On-Demand Instances? The pricing doesn't offer a Windows and SQL Server Usage costing. http://aws.amazon.com/windows/ http://aws.amazon.com/windows/

johns 16y ago
You probably could, but that's not really enough RAM to do anything worthwhile with SQL Server. And you'd have to install it yourself it appears.
mjallday 16y ago
The best option if you wanted to do this would be to install SQL Server Express since you're not going anywhere near the memory limit of 4 gig that that product is bound by. That way you're not going to incur any licensing cost for SQL Server provided you can live with the DB having a file size limit of 4 gig.
- azeroz 16y ago
  Tried it with SQL Server Express on Server 2008, pushed RAM usage right up to ~530/613 MB before even starting SQL Server. Regardless, I'm glad to see the offering. Was looking for something similar and with the bar of entry constantly getting lower by competition rising, am sure it'll find a niche.
  - astrodust 16y ago
    For crappy PHP blog hosting, it's a pretty good deal compared to "shared" hosting where you take your chances.

mattjung 16y ago

Seems that EC2 feels some competitive pressure...Yet a big move that kills the (superficial) cost-argument against the Amazon offer.

swombat 16y ago
I don't think that argument is superficial. At scale, Amazon is actually quite pricey. Currently, Amazon makes most sense if your site does have large variability in usage and if it makes use of the ability to spin up/down instances on demand. If you're an event-related site where usage goes up by a factor of 10-100 for a few hours every week, for example, Amazon makes a whole lot of sense. However, if your usage is way up there all week long, it seems to me there are significantly cheaper alternatives, e.g. Hetzner servers.
- jread 16y ago
  One of the biggest advantages to using EC2 is its scaling capabilities. EC2 offers 10 different instance sizes from m1.small to cc.4xlarge (with 10 Gbps clustering capabilities), 4 different regions, auto-scaling, load balancing, high availability via off-instance storage, durability via copying, GigE uplinks, and much more. You can't get that level of features from in any other IaaS cloud I am aware of. Yes, you might pay more than co-locating yourself or leasing some dedicated servers... but that isn't exactly an apples to apples comparison to EC2.
- rbranson 16y ago
  Do you have a testing environment or multiple testing environments? Does it/Do they need to run all the time? If not, you save there. Do you like being able to spin up an entire duplicate of your environment to do environmental tests? You can't do that in normal server environments without ridiculous expenditure.

alex1 16y ago

It doesn't seem to be up on the pricing page yet (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/). Are 32-bit and 64-bit the same price?

johns 16y ago
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing is where I see it now. I can't find anything that would indicate different prices for 32- or 64-bit.

madewulf 16y ago

It seems there is no local storage included in the price. I did not try, but that probably means complicated settings, which is a pity, since while the price could probably appeal to people launching side projects at minimal costs, like me, being a side project also means that not much time can be devoted to sysadminery.

johns 16y ago
Go to the AWS console and launch one. It's pretty much as simple as it can be. They automatically use EBS so they're persistent. No special configuration required.
- madewulf 16y ago
  Then it is really interesting. I have a few possible use cases in mind : - we are hosting a little software load balancer for web services and it definitely does not need more than that - thanks to the web service api of Amazon, it is relatively easy to set automated recovery plans, and the idea is very attractive, but until now I was detterred by the price. - for small web applications with low bandwith, the price is good. For reserved instances, for one year, you pay 54$ up front, then 87.6$ for usage for the whole year, for a total of 141.6. That's a lot less than renting a server at linode.com for a year (~220$).
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

drtse4 16y ago

If you book a reserved instance, the price for lnx get as low as $0.01 ($54/yr). It's a bit premature but for spot instances, atm windows ones are around $0.0135 (linux history is not yet available). As for other instance-types it looks like that with spot instances you'll get the usual 60% off the original price. EDIT: $54 upfront and then $0.01

mrb 16y ago
$0.01/hr is $88/yr
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

aneth 16y ago

I'm an AWS user, and I also use Rackspace some, so interesting to find this article indicating you're better off with a small Rackspace instance than a medium AWS instance. http://www.thebitsource.com/featured-posts/rackspace-cloud-servers-versus-amazon-ec2-performance-analysis/ http://www.thebitsource.com/featured-posts/rackspace-cloud-s...

jread 16y ago
This study was sponsored by Rackspace... I think the end results are questionable. Here is a study I wrote comparing AWS, Rackspace and some other cloud providers using some more standard benchmarking methods: http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchmarking-in-cloud.html http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchma...

forkqueue 16y ago

Anyone got any ideas why the strangely specific size of 613MB RAM?

mrb 16y ago
Sure. They probably followed a similar reasoning (example with fictional numbers, but probably close to reality): * They have 64GB RAM hosts. * They want to dedicate only up to 85% of the RAM to the Xen instances (keep 15% for the host OS, buffercache, etc). * The Operations/Management team decides to target an overall rate of $1.82/hr per host to achieve desirable profits. * The AWS marketing department has a requirement that instances be priced $.xx/hr (no fractional cents) to evoke "simplicity". * At a first pricing attempt, they see they have the choice of charging $.02/hr and assigning 65536 * .85 / (1.82 / .02) = 612MB per instance * ...or charging $.03/hr and assigning 65536 * 0.85 / (1.82 / .03) = 918MB per instance * They select the first option (612MB/instance) because it is deemed sufficiently smaller than the existing "small" 1.7GB instance offering, whereas 918MB was not small enough.
- miyabo 16y ago
  I believe they're using chunks of RAM on each physical server to hold S3 objects. This might help explain where the "buffer/cache" is going to.
  - astrodust 16y ago
    That makes almost no sense. S3 is a purely network based file delivery service over HTTP, and pre-dates EC2 by a significant amount of time. A Xen supervisor needs a fair amount of memory for its own operations, plus it can buffer the physical disks in the machine as well as any network attached storage. If these servers were also hosting S3 in their "spare time" it would degrade performance, and expose the system to potential vulnerabilities.

fierarul 16y ago

This might just make me replace the Slicehost instance I use for Mercurial and build server. Elastic IP + EBS + micro instance makes a pretty nice low level machine. It always bothered me that for a development server you are basically overpaying for bandwidth. Who cares I have 450GB bandwidth when I use maybe 30GB per month ?

YooLi 16y ago
Try Rackspace Cloud Servers (Rackspace owns Slicehost too). Pretty much the same configs as slicehost except no bundled bandwidth so you only pay $11 a month. No affiliation to them but I do have VPSs at both (slicehost for things that require lots of bandwidth).
- fierarul 16y ago
  Yeah, I thought about that too, but apparently there is no way to migrate data (a slice) from Slicehost to Rackspace automatically. And if I have to do it myself I might as well use Amazon, I use it for everything else anyhow.

mrb 16y ago

I notice that, in a sense, AWS proves that the Total Cost of Ownership of Windows infrastructures is higher than the TCO of Linux infrastructures. Amazon charges more for Windows instances across their entire offering. A Windows micro instance costs 50% more than a Linux micro instance ($.03/hr vs $.02/hr). This likely reflects Amazon's statistical studies on their EC2 datacenters that a Windows stack (OS + apps) uses on average more resources than a Linux stack, therefore more power costs, cooling costs, etc.

lars512 16y ago
I imagine the price difference also relates to licensing costs for Windows instances. Also, TCO is more than just compute efficiency, although the latter is important in its own right.
mellampudi 16y ago
Who said amazon charges according to what is costs them ? Infact, I CAN say, that, according to the market, windows is better than linux and hence amazon is charging more for windows machines.
- YooLi 16y ago
  What mythical market are you referring to?
jasonkester 16y ago
It proves the part that wasn't in dispute. That is, that free software costs less to purchase than licensed software. The TCO debate centers around the labor required to set up & maintain one versus the other. That, incidentally, is why I run Windows on all my EC2 boxes.

andrevoget 16y ago

The spot prices are very low for the new Micro Instances. For Linux servers they are currently at $0.007/hour (about $5/month).

jread 16y ago
A good strategy I've used with EC2 for the past 6 months is to always purchase spot instances using a bid price that is just slightly above the on-demand price. Generally spot pricing stays around the much lower reserve pricing but will occasionally spike. By doing this, you basically get reserve pricing without having to pay the upfront reserve fee, and can keep your spot instance online long term. This site provides some useful historical data on spot pricing: http://cloudexchange.org http://cloudexchange.org
- grep 16y ago
  Can you keep your spot instance up 24/7?
  - gxti 16y ago
    No, spot instances can be shut down anytime you are outbid.
    - tibbon 16y ago
      However, they can be great to help fill out your server cluster with things that don't always need to stay up (like Mongel servers). Buy some reserved instances, then put out several spot bids as well for things you can load balance to.
      - bdonlan 16y ago
        That said, keep in mind that if you need to keep at least one instance up, you need to put them in multiple availability zones, or vary the max spot prices - if there's a load spike that leads to your spot instances being terminated, it'll likely hit all of the spot instances at a given price in the same AZ.

jread 16y ago

Here is a Geekbench benchmark report for one of these new micro instances: http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=287891 http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=287891 . It uses the same E5430 processors as the other m1 instances. CPU performance is about 2x m1.small based on these m1.small Geekbench results: http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=241412 http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=241412 and comparable to a rackspace 4GB server I also benchmarked: http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=243138 http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=243138.

drtse4 16y ago
Lower total score (higher fp, lower everything else) if your instance has an older Opteron 2218HE (us-east-1b) http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=287900 http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=287900
- jread 16y ago
  To my knowledge (I've spun up many EC2 m1.small instances in all 4 regions), Opteron 2218s are only in use in us-east. The other 3 regions use E5430s.
_delirium 16y ago
That CPU performance is consistent with what they give as the burst performance: up to 2 EC2 Compute Units, which should be 2x as much as the small instances' 1 ECU. Would be interesting to know how often/long you can burst, and what the non-burst baseline is, though.

bravura 16y ago

Why is it not possible to get Small Standard instances with 64-bit architectures? This is the only instance that is missing 64-bit. Even Micro instances offer 64-bit.

jread 16y ago
c1.medium is also available only in 32-bit

simon_kun 16y ago

The real interest is in seeing what the downstream value added services do with this. For example, I'm interested to see what changes this makes to the Heroku offering. It seems to be a perfect fit for their product.

grep 16y ago
I hope EngineYard drop their prices a lot. I really want to use it but it's too expensive.
- mayanks 16y ago
  Same here. I am sure EngineYard will use this opportunity to provide services on micro-instances. It's going to be a big boost to EngineYard. Heroku, not as much I guess since they anyway run multiple dynos on a single m/c.

10ren 16y ago

Aside: I looked into AWS a couple weeks ago, to play with a simple webapp idea, but the myriad choices, acronyms and signups confused me, and there was [seemed to be] no free options for getting started, and initial traction. It seems focussed on sophisticated enterprise users (nothing wrong with that). So, I went with google's App Engine, which was much simpler, and has been great. These micro-instances seem the same. Did I give up too soon?

ryandvm 16y ago
If you can make your app fit within the significant limitations of App Engine, then it is a great service. I've used it for several projects from basic CMS to AJAX chat. That said, sooner or later you'll want to do something that should seem possible on App Engine (e.g., image transformations with BufferedImage) and you'll hit a brick wall. That's when I turn to a generic Ubuntu image running on EC2. It's not free, but with spot pricing it's awfully cheap. I expect spot pricing for this newest micro size to stabilize at around $10 a month.

10ren 16y ago

Aside: How far off are we from renting our PCs in the cloud, and just having a local terminal? I know it's an old Failed Dream (mainframe-terminal, client-server, settop box etc), but maybe we're getting closer... It seems a bit ridiculous, because you still need a bit of local power for display and fast reactions, and current iPhones/netbooks could do with more power. But desktop PC's have been fast enough in that respect for a while. An advantage of the cloud is that as RAM, cycle prices etc drop, you get it (more of them or cheaper) without the hassle of physically upgrading. And bursty usage is available too, eg. when compiling. There's solid economics here: it's a sort of timesharing idea, instead of cycles being wasted while you type, someone else uses them to compile. Even more compelling globally - someone else uses them while you sleep. The same argument works for sharing your desktop's own cycles, p2p, but a centralized cloud has admin advantages and other economies of scale.

tibbon 16y ago
OnLive has gotten pretty close with their gaming platform. They've shown demos of Autocad software and I believe Photoshop running with it.
- 10ren 16y ago
  OnLive sounds cool, but it's a little hard to believe, since latency is a common issue in regular gaming already. Demos are invariably carefully orchestrated. The other thing that gives me pause is that it is such a compelling vision for publishers. It's an absolutely magic idea. However, this enthusiasm is not technology-driven: it's not about what has become possible, but what would be really amazingly cool if it was possible. But latency isn't such an issue for compiling etc. Someone was saying in the instant google thread that 250ms is imperceptible for search (and I've heard 200ms for the command line, from Rob Pike on Go). That's much lower hanging fruit than for gaming, where 250ms latency is far from instant but unplayable.
  - rbranson 16y ago
    How is it hard to believe? They are essentially doing what Akamai did and locating server farms very "close" to end users on the network. I have a 20ms ping from the closest Akamai CDN server.

mr_luc 16y ago

$0.02/hr == approximately $14/mo if you leave it on. Is this really $6/mo cheaper than a linode 512? That might be nice for personal projects. I'm trying to teach myself some things that really need more than my local dev machine (puppet, backup strategies/more resilient code, learning cassandra). I've been running a bunch of VM's on my laptop, but my dev machine is a weakling and can't hardly handle it. It almost seems like I could just spin up a dozen of these little instances for $2.88 per waking day and teach myself under substantially more "real" conditions on the cheap. That's something I'd love to have as an option on linode, given that teaching myself is a large part of what I use it for. Is there any reason that wouldn't work? Is this too complicated in practice?

tibbon 16y ago
None that I can see. I'm going to buy one reserved one, even though I have 7 hardware servers. I need to get better with the platform and for $54/year, the price is right
bdonlan 16y ago
Remember, though, you still need to pay for EBS and bandwidth seperately.
- mr_luc 16y ago
  Which should be pretty low if I'm the only user. Linode doesn't charge you for bandwidth between nodes in the same datacenter -- is there something comparable in the EC2 world?
  - pcarmichael 16y ago
    Yes, but only if the nodes are in the same region and availability zone. From amazon's pricing page [http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/]: There is no Data Transfer charge between Amazon EC2 and other Amazon Web Services within the same region (i.e. between Amazon EC2 US West and Amazon S3 in US West). Data transferred between Amazon EC2 instances located in different Availability Zones in the same Region will be charged Regional Data Transfer. Data transferred between AWS services in different regions will be charged as Internet Data Transfer on both sides of the transfer.

grep 16y ago

What can we conclude about the performance comparing with Linode and Slicehost smaller offers? I'm curious if anyone has any conclusions.

atomical 16y ago

I pay about $18 for hosting from a provider and get 500 gigs of transfer and 60 gigs of storage space. I was hoping this would be a real deal.

enko 16y ago

This is a big deal for us mongodb fans, who were bitten badly by the small instance's 32 bit limitation. Sign me up.

cschneid 16y ago

So how often do EC2 instances go down? Is it at hardware fail rate? or more often? Can I use this as a VPS replacement, and not have to worry about monitoring and fast restoration? (of non-important projects).

mchadwick 16y ago
We've been running hundreds of instances on EC2 for a couple years, and have never seen one just "go down." However, we will get notifications of "degraded instances." When an instance is degraded, you have some window (generally a couple days) to move the services running on that instance to another one. Even at the aforementioned scale, this happens maybe once every three to four months. Can you use this as a VPS replacement? Probably. My guess is that your uptime will be no worse than some VPS provider. However, if you're storing information on the ephemeral storage, the onus is on you to get it to the new instance. I imagine that isn't generally the case on a VPS. You may be able to mitigate this by using EBS (required in the case of these micro instances), but I've only used EBS a handful of times, and am no expert on the subject. If I understand their layout for these micro instances, it would simply be a matter of spinning up a new instance and spinning down the degraded node.
mceachen 16y ago
I think you'd need a pretty large sample set before you came to any reasonable conclusion. I've been running ~10 nodes for AdGrok for the last 3 months, and we've already had one node fail (in that it wouldn't respond to any ec2 cli command to shut down or even terminate). That hardware failure rate is about what I'd expect if it was our own colo and our own machines. Stuff always breaks.
ary 16y ago
It's difficult to say. I've worked at two companies that have used EC2 for various purposes. One had an instance that was used for dev work get "corrupted" on three separate occasions (I couldn't get the specifics, but there were definitely I/O issues with the instance storage), and the other has been using the same production box for more than a year. The bottom line is that EC2 installations need to be designed as semi-permanent. My preferred strategy is similar to how Google talks about their hardware (when they do), that any one server can go down at any time, but the overall setup is resilient to failure.

rbranson 16y ago

Now that there are very small instances with 64-bit support, these can form the basis of the ultimate incrementally scalable MongoDB cluster.

mark_l_watson 16y ago
My thought also, but be a little careful: you really want enough memory on mongod servers to keep the indices in memory.
- rbranson 16y ago
  It's my understanding that the indices would be sharded as well, so wouldn't you be able to just fire up more instances if the indices started to approach some kind of 80% figure?
  - mark_l_watson 16y ago
    I think you are right, but I have never had to use sharding with MongoDB (yet)

psadauskas 16y ago

I put together a google spreadsheet of the EC2 instance pricing. US East / West only, so far. https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AtNTMtkGNKnfdGJoajFpdDNXUUxFX1BOd3Q3bzQ2bEE&hl=en https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AtNTMtkGNKnfdGJoajF... $10/mo for 1 year reserved is pretty amazing.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
jefft 16y ago
don't forget the cost of the EBS volume. that'd be an extra $5/mo for 50GB of storage
- psadauskas 16y ago
  Yes, you're correct. But its the same $5 no matter what instance size you use, which is what this spreadsheet is for. Also, on my small slicehost, I'm paying $20/mo for 1/3 the RAM, and using 6GB of disk, which would be $0.60 on EBS.
  - tomstuart 16y ago
    Well, you don't need the EBS volume on other instance sizes, because they have instance storage.
    - gokhan 16y ago
      Nothing durable, though.
- astrodust 16y ago
  That's a lot cheaper than an extra 50GB on Linode.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

mceachen 16y ago

I've been using the high-cpu medium instances (c1.medium) for our rails nodes, just to avoid the slothy m1.small CPU. It seems like these are tailor-made for running either haproxy or your web tier!

cmelbye 16y ago

This is awesome, now it's super affordable for me to run beanstalkd and a few queue workers as necessary and communicate with my Heroku app over the Amazon private network.

rjurney 16y ago

Very impressed that these are available in 64 bit. That means that one OS image can scale from micro to ginormous. WIN.

jasonrowland 16y ago

The Amazon EC2 is sooo slow. I spun up an instance for Amazon and Rackspace both to see how long it would take to render a frame in Blender. It is shocking how slow the difference was. I didn't do an apples-to-apples comparison, but the Rackspace blender 64bit 2.49b rendered in 47 seconds. The Amazon linux blender 2.48 rendered in 17 minutes! http://www.jasonrowland.com/2010/09/amazon-vs-rackspace-for-blender/ http://www.jasonrowland.com/2010/09/amazon-vs-rackspace-for-...