

EC2's M3 Instances Go Global; Reduced EC2 Charges and Lower Bandwidth Prices - jeffbarr
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/02/ec2s-m3-global-reduced-ec2-bandwidth.html

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makeshifthoop
I wonder how many people actually use the on-demand instances on a regular
basis. For me, I purchase reserved instances in the marketplace and I never
touch the on demand pricing. The past two price "reductions" have not affected
me because the reserved pricing remains the same. For someone who does not
want to sign 1/3 year lease, I find spot pricing to be more attractive than on
demand. For the small chance that your instance will get terminated, you get
to enjoy the same performance at 1/10 the on demand price. What if you need
reliability / short term lease? I would use the amazon marketplace and find
other people selling their reservation in the 1-11 month range (not
guaranteed)

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skram
Agreed. I've moved my projects to reserved instances

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nubela
There is a reason why Amazon is one of the most "overpriced" companies out
there as according to the stock market. Every decision is made for the user.
And I just LOVE Amazon!

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ezequiel-garzon
This is a pet peeve of mine, and I wonder how many HNers share this feeling.
Why doesn't Amazon provide hard spending limits? Back in 2006 [1] this feature
was supposed to be "in the works", but clearly it's not.

Just as with the low security of many domain registrars, I guess there are not
as many horror stories as my paranoid mind would lead me to believe. Any
thoughts?

PS: Yes, I understand the dangers of enabling these limits, which ideally
should be accompanied by previous alerts, etc.

[1] <https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=10532>

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rkalla
This is one of those ideas that makes all the sense in the world in practice,
and then someone turns on the limits and you hear about how "NewHotness.com"
goes down on Black Friday because of the Hard Limits feature in a big news
story and how AWS should never offer a feature like this because "you never
know how much you might scale in a flood of users" and "that is the whole
point of cloud computing!"

Amazon is just saving themselves the heartache of all the irony :)

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ezequiel-garzon
I imagine that must be their thinking. Clearly a lack of technical resources
it's not. Moreover, Amazon has already shown [1] good will when negligence led
to an unexpectedly high bill.

I'm surprised (though empirically without much reason) not to hear stories
from NewHotness et al about "how AWS burned five times our monthly budget in
one day of frenzy". Even if those new visitors may very well be welcome for
the business, I imagine there are many folks who would like _some_ control
(say, to double the limit), maybe at the risk of leaving the site offline for
a few minutes.

[1] [http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2012/04/google-
attack-...](http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2012/04/google-attack-how-i-
self-attacked.html)

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hayksaakian
Do these price drops ever trickle down to, say, users of heroku? I've not used
heroku for very long, but this is the 2nd time since I started that AWS has
dropped their prices, however I've heard nary a tale from heroku.

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jwilliams
Heroku is a big enough user to negotiate their own prices with Amazon, so I'd
guess not.

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Smerity
Just to expand on this, if you spend $2-5 million on reserved instances, you
get a standard 20% discount[1]. If you spend more than $5 million, Amazon just
say "Contact Us". Heroku certainly qualify for the "Contact Us" discount: at
an average of $1,000 per reserved instance, they only need 5,000 servers, yet
they're hosting well over 1 million sites.

Heroku provide a service that significantly simplifies the deploy experience,
though you pay a premium for that privilege. If you're willing to take the
complexity hit of deploying to EC2 instead of using Heroku due to price,
you're not really Heroku's target market. I'd expect a price decrease
eventually, though likely in reaction to direct competitors rather than the
drop in cost of the EC2 infrastructure itself.

[1]: <http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/#reserved-volume-discounts>

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benologist
It would be really useful if you included the M1 and M3 on the pricing page.
It's annoying the way information and pricing are kept so separate.

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michaelt
Like <http://www.ec2instances.info/> ?

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ceejayoz
The massive drop in inter-region pricing is going to be really nice for folks
running apps with failover to other regions. We're working on cross-region
replication for our new infrastructure, so this comes at a perfect time for
us...

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No1
This drop in inter-region data transfer prices is huge, and frankly, long
overdue. Distributing across regions might actually be viable for companies
that don't have money coming out of their ears.

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ibig
I do a lot of number crunching on the CPU. I dont need security or
reliability.

Is EC2 a good choice if you just want to do that? Or what would you guys use
for that?

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plasma
In my experience CPU of cloud servers is generally... bad.

If you do regular CPU work (24/7), you may be better off getting dedicated
servers (with raw CPU grunt) for far cheaper cost per month.

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ibig
dedicated hardware. common. that might have been an option in the 90s. i want
to be able to use as many cpus as i want when i need them. not have a bunch of
machines rotting away idle.

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jhartmann
I would actually recommend a hybrid approach. If you don't need too much
memory there is a cpu heavy Amazon instance that you should scale up and down
and have a VPN between a dedicated co-lo machine that handles the base load.
If you need memory and cpu, its going to be costly to use EC2 unless you pay
upfront for dedicated instances. In this case though the economics are
probably not as favorable as getting some co-lo servers and letting them rot
away. In short you will need to do a cost benefit analysis to see what makes
sense.

For our service we are going to use a co-lo server for our processing with an
Elastic Beanstalk frontend and use a VPC + OpenVPN setup to bridge the two. We
will incur some bandwidth charges because of this, but the cross talk between
the boxes is actually minimal, since the client will post directly to the co-
lo box(es) when it needs to upload, etc.

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tyw
very excited for the lower S3 -> CloudFront prices. that change alone is going
to save my site probably 25-35% on our CDN bandwidth charges.

