
Announcing Micro Instances for Amazon EC2 - bpuvanathasan
http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2010/09/09/announcing-micro-instances-for-amazon-ec2/
======
mr_luc
$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?

~~~
petercooper
One thing to note is that even EC2's "small" instance pales in comparison CPU-
wise to even the low end Linodes. When playing with EC2, it blew me away how
ridiculously slow they are until you get to the high levels (oddly it seemed
the _memory_ speed was also very poor - I had to wonder if even memory was
networked somehow).

~~~
mr_luc
I took a few minutes to google a few terms, like "cassandra EC2" and so forth.

I get the general impression that doing anything architecture-y or
deployment-y requires amazon-specific steps, steps that I don't have to take
on a barebones ubuntu install. (of the 'Do this to get Thrift working on EC2'
variety)

That sucks some activation energy away.

The ease/hurdles of VMs on my dev machine, even if performance is a bit of a
bear, is still more attractive to me than doing anything Amazon-specific,
because it's still all just unix.

I don't want to learn "Amazon", I want to learn [puppet, Cassandra, et al].

~~~
Vitaly
hmm. I do cassandra on EC2 and I can't think of any ec2 specific setup that I
need to do. Its just plain ubuntu. I do install my own custom cassandra to
stay on top, but I would do that on any ubuntu install.

~~~
lzw
I think he's talking about making an AMI for his particular packages.

This is an issue for me to. It looks like a hassle and the instructions look
vague and all I want to do is just setup a VM on my machine and then run it on
amazon.

Turnkey Linux seems to make this better.

I'm guessing you're just using an off the shelf Ubuntu AMI, right?

------
10ren
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.

~~~
javery
If you take a look at the sad state of this countries broadband infrastructure
we are a long way off. I live in a "tech" city, I have two internet
connections (Time Warner and ClearWire) patched together on a high-end router
and I still wait for things I shouldn't have to.

~~~
blhack
How much of a speed increase do you see because of this setup?

Are these actually redundant carriers, or is the last leg owned by qwest and
just leased to Time Warner and ClearWire?

------
jread
Here is a Geekbench benchmark report for one of these new micro instances:
<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> and comparable to a
rackspace 4GB server I also benchmarked:
<http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=243138>.

~~~
drtse4
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>

~~~
jread
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.

------
10ren
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
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.

------
johns
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
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
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
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
They support Remote Desktop, but since they're Server 2008 the only IE
instance you could run on it is IE8.

~~~
eli
You could probably use one of the hacky solutions like IETester
(<http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage>) for older versions.

I'd much rather run IE locally in a VM though.

------
bravura
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
c1.medium is also available only in 32-bit

------
psadauskas
I put together a google spreadsheet of the EC2 instance pricing. US East /
West only, so far.

[https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AtNTMtkGNKnfdGJoajF...](https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AtNTMtkGNKnfdGJoajFpdDNXUUxFX1BOd3Q3bzQ2bEE&hl=en)

$10/mo for 1 year reserved is pretty amazing.

~~~
jefft
don't forget the cost of the EBS volume. that'd be an extra $5/mo for 50GB of
storage

~~~
psadauskas
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
Well, you don't _need_ the EBS volume on other instance sizes, because they
have instance storage.

~~~
gokhan
Nothing durable, though.

------
andrevoget
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
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>

~~~
grep
Can you keep your spot instance up 24/7?

~~~
gxti
No, spot instances can be shut down anytime you are outbid.

~~~
tibbon
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
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.

~~~
grep
If you keep your offer high enough, you can keep spot instances running 24/7,
unless there's no offers at all.

~~~
tibbon
There was a bug a while ago that it would occasionally kill them, even if you
were well above all spot prices.

------
fierarul
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
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
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.

------
madewulf
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
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
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$).

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

~~~
staunch
$0.03 * 24 * 30 = $21/mo?

~~~
_delirium
The Linux instances are $0.02/hr.

~~~
staunch
Ah, yes. Thanks.

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

------
simon_kun
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
I hope EngineYard drop their prices a lot. I really want to use it but it's
too expensive.

~~~
mayanks
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.

------
rbranson
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
My thought also, but be a little careful: you really want enough memory on
mongod servers to keep the indices in memory.

~~~
rbranson
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
I think you are right, but I have never had to use sharding with MongoDB (yet)

------
drtse4
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
$0.01/hr is $88/yr

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

~~~
mrb
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
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
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.

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

~~~
dfranke
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
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
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.

------
cschneid
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).

~~~
mceachen
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.

------
mceachen
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!

------
mrb
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.

~~~
mellampudi
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
What mythical market are you referring to?

------
jasonrowland
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-...](http://www.jasonrowland.com/2010/09/amazon-vs-rackspace-for-blender/)

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

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

~~~
swombat
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
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.

------
dawson
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/>

~~~
mjallday
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
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
For crappy PHP blog hosting, it's a pretty good deal compared to "shared"
hosting where you take your chances.

------
alex1
It doesn't seem to be up on the pricing page yet
(<http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/>). Are 32-bit and 64-bit the same price?

~~~
johns
<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.

------
cmelbye
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.

------
PStamatiou
Hrm I don't see the option?

<http://cl.ly/0430c3a3f00c59743368>

edit: only appears to be available with certain AMIs

~~~
spahl
It only works with EBS backed AMIs.

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

------
muyyatin
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.

~~~
chrisboesing
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.

------
aneth
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-s...](http://www.thebitsource.com/featured-posts/rackspace-cloud-
servers-versus-amazon-ec2-performance-analysis/)

~~~
jread
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-
benchma...](http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchmarking-
in-cloud.html)

------
atomical
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.

