

New EC2 Standard Instances and Price Reductions - jeffbarr
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/10/new-ec2-second-generation-standard-instances-and-price-reductions-1.html

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cperciva
Always nice to see new options, but I wish Amazon hadn't dropped the ephemeral
disk. Quite apart from the issue of surviving EBS failures, ephemeral disks
are wonderful for swap space -- since the lifetime of swap exactly matches the
lifetime of ephemeral disks. I even have a startup script in FreeBSD which
autoconfigures swap space striped across a few GB of ephemeral disks.

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paulsutter
All of the disk performance benchmarks (iops, throughout, buffered vs
unbuffered) I ran on ephemeral disks matched exactly the performance of ebs.
That could be a coincidence that my tests ran only on machines without local
disk, but more likely ephemeral disk was really just EBS in most cases. So it
always seemed like a silly or even misleading product to me.

~~~
jspthrowaway
Ephemeral is definitely not EBS, as its I/O does not contribute to saturating
an instance's network connection (I've tested that). EBS has a ceiling for
throughput (the instance's network throughput) and competes with your other
network traffic, which is interesting for database workloads for obvious
reasons. In addition, every single benchmark I've seen run reports ephemeral
behaving very differently from EBS.

As ephemeral disappears when you stop an instance (presumably, when the system
is given the opportunity to relocate your instance to another machine), I've
always suspected that ephemeral storage was part of local disks on the virtual
host's chassis -- as opposed to a SAN or other kind of network-attached
storage. As such, you probably end up with the same unpredictable performance
you find in all virtualized resources, since it is very unlikely that Amazon
is giving you your own storage.

Before benchmarking ephemeral storage you have to pre-warm it, which might
have contributed to your findings. Ephemeral is worlds better than EBS,
particularly in outage scenarios; if I could convince everybody on planet
Earth to stop using EBS, it would be a noble cause.

~~~
paulsutter
Hmm, I have been told by Amazon and confirmed in my testing that EBS is immune
to the network throttle (unlike machismo to machine tcP, s3, etc)

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jspthrowaway
It's not a throttle, it's the "physical" capacity of the "interface". If
you're on an instance with gigabit connectivity and you're doing 1 Gb/s of EBS
I/O, other network chatter will suffer, probably fairly dramatically. That's
why the high-I/O instances have 10 gigabit connectivity, as I understand it.

Happy to be proven wrong but this is based on a year or so of experience
dealing with EBS. You can't see the EBS traffic in your tools (at least that
I've been able to find), which complicates things.

It's all kinds of different on VPC instances, therefore I suspect the network
interface model -- and possibly EBS connectivity -- is different on those. So,
who knows? I'd kill for Amazon to be more forthcoming here so I could
understand the infrastructure running my fleet, but, I don't and they aren't.

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windsurfer
Hey, you got hellbanned for posting on this thread:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4743954>

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antirez
For some reason that is currently unknown to me (did not investigated) this
instances are much better with Redis since they are able to fork using more or
less 1/20th of the time needed before. (4.4 GB process forked into 44ms
instead of 1 second).

EDIT: it's just hardware virtualized mode (HVM).

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redegg
That's strange. Did they upgrade the Micro instance's memory too?

> The Micro instance (1.7 GB of memory) is great for lower throughput
> applications and web sites.

I assume its a typo. Otherwise, fenomenal news!

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recuter
The Micro instance remains at 613MB according to:
<http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/>

So looks like a type-o sadly.

~~~
jeffbarr
Typo - Fixed, but only because my back went out and I can't sleep.

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nilsbunger
Too bad they didn't reduce any of the reserved instance pricing. So
effectively they've reduced the cost for things that scale up and down a lot,
but not for permanent base load.

~~~
vyrotek
I'm not sure why this is a surprise. Real 'clouds' in my opinion are all about
elasticity. If you can't benefit from that then you're wasting your money and
should host elsewhere.

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adpowers
Because most users have a relatively fixed base load, and buying reserved
instances for that base load lets you save lots of money. The ideal setup
would look like: reserved instances for base load, on-demand for natural daily
curves, and spot instances for batch or price sensitive work.

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debacle
Having never used EC2, I wonder what an instance would cost me each month if I
were to use it for something like hosting my website.

I'm very happy where I am now, but I'm interested in learning more about
Amazon's offerings and moving my blog over would probably be a good first
step.

~~~
bpatrianakos
I'm in your same position exactly but unfortunately the options aren't good
for what you (and me) will use it for. Before this price drop a Micro instance
would run you about $15 - $20 monthly. About the same as I pay for my 512
Linode. But I've heard horror stories about the CPU on the Micro not being
able to handle any amount of moderate traffic for more than a few minutes at a
time. So then there's the Small instances which are, at least for me, ideal
anyway but when you do the math on a Small instance running 24/7 each month
with just 10GB of EBS storage you get up past $60 a month. Okay, not bad -
pretty close to VPS pricing, actually. But $60/month is a lot for me to spend
on hosting a blog so its not for me. I don't know about you. Maybe your
priorities and financial situation is different. I'm not hurting at all
financially, I'm just cheap (which is why I'm not hurting financially).

~~~
tdfx
You can run a small reserved instance for $11.71/month (with $195 prepayment
for the year). That comes out to about $27.96/month, plus data transfer fees.
If you prepay for 3 years, it averages out to about $17.85/month.

~~~
debacle
I'd rather pay $20 a month for a VPS that I don't have to prepay for.

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shimms
Pity they didn't introduce smaller High I/O instance types. I would love High
I/O but don't need anywhere near 60Gb RAM :/

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NoPiece
It would be interesting if they could get rid of "types" concept, and just let
people pull together memory, ecus, and storage on demand.

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cperciva
That would be a provisioning nightmare, trying to figure out which partially-
used-up box to place a new instance into. Much easier to slice them into fixed
sizes.

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rbanffy
Someone's provisioning nightmare is someone else's business opportunity ;-)

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mkuhn
Cloudsigma (www.cloudsigma.com) is trying to grasp that opportunity.

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NoPiece
I like that the new instance types have a more balanced ratio of memory to
ecu, but wish they had included some smaller sizes. I'd like an m3.medium with
4gb and 4 ecu (or an m3.large with 8gm and 8 ecu).

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nivertech
Does new instances work with regular paravirtual AMIs or do you need to build
an HVM AMI like for cluster compute?

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EwanToo
It's great that EC2 prices are coming down, but they're really not keeping up
with the general trend in computing prices.

If you're running a static set of computers on EC2 today, and not making use
of other features like S3, ELB, etc, you're almost certainly overpaying by a
significant amount compared to even high end dedicated server providers, let
alone the cheap end of the market like OVH and Hetzner.

~~~
lmm
It's always been true that running a static set of computers on EC2 means
you're overpaying. It's not a case of not keeping up with the trend.

~~~
sp332
Reserved Amazon instances are not the cheapest but are competitive with some
hosting providers. I've seen some comparisons where they're right in line with
Rackspace's cloud offerings, with each winning on slightly different specs.
And of course Amazon has different bandwidth pricing than almost anyone else
(charging per-request as well as per-GB) so that might make the difference.

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api
EC2 is still kind of expensive.

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kalininalex
Compared to what?

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trustfundbaby
... linode

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robryan
No price drop for US West California though?

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kalininalex
We switched to Oregon once we discovered the price advantage and never looked
back. Granted, our deployment is relatively small right now.

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jeaguilar
What's your latency experience been? Is yours a public-facing deployment?

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capo
I heard a rumor that Compute Engine was supposed to open to everyone today, I
suppose this reinforces that rumor.

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ridruejo
Can you provide more details / URL?

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ForFreedom
Its good for small users. How does 0.0x effect a saving for others.

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priteau
No matter how small or how big a customer you are, it is a price decrease. The
cost of these first-generation standard on-demand instances has been reduced
by 18.75%.

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ceejayoz
Well, except micros.

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priteau
Micro instances (t1.micro) are not part of the group of first-generation
standard instances (m1.*).

