
EC2 Update – T2.Nano Instances Now Available - jeffbarr
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-update-t2-nano-instances-now-available/
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nodesocket
Very nice. A direct competitor to the entry level DigitalOcean 512MB servers
which cost $5 a month. The great thing is that as your grow, you won't outgrow
AWS, which is not necessary true with DO.

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_hyn3
Only if you're not actually using that instance!

You can't even log into the instance at all for that price. You also have to
pay for bandwidth (very expensive) and EBS (not bad, unless you want it to be
as fast as DO's local SSD).

Setting aside that the DO droplets are far more bang for the buck in terms of
consistent CPU usage, and also (to be fair) that AWS offers far more
scalability options, bandwidth alone is shockingly expensive at AWS.

At 9 cents per GB, you'd be looking at $90/mo for bandwidth alone for what DO
gives you included in the $5/mo.

The $80/mo Digital Ocean server w/ 5TB of transfer would cost $450 at EC2
_JUST IN BANDWIDTH ALONE!!_

And, at DO, if you exceed that bandwidth allocation that's included for free,
it's $20/TB vs $90/TB at EC2 (both charge outgoing only).

These are costs that most people don't consider but really amount to poorly
explained fine print costs. (Others include Glacier restore pricing, intra-
region bandwidth, etc.)

(disclaimer: I'm an AWS certified SA and my SSH key manager startup,
Userify[1], is an AWS partner, but even so we are still forced to use DO for a
large part of our infrastructure -- especially where bandwidth is concerned.)

1\. [https://userify.com](https://userify.com) (cloud ssh key management)

~~~
jsmthrowaway
And to use 5TB in a month you have to sustain over 15 megabit/sec 24 hours a
day. DO is betting on you not doing that (and in aggregate nobody does),
because in any other context sustaining 15 megabit is about as expensive as
Amazon. Quote a 100 megabit drop some time if you don't believe me.

If every VPS on Digital Ocean and Linode actually used their quota, they
wouldn't have uplink capacity to support it and the network would fail. That's
overselling. Numbers that high are _extensive_ overselling. Linode has 40 Gbit
links (at least they used to), and give 2 TB (6 Mbps) to each small Linode,
meaning about 7,000 Linodes actually using the quota would saturate the link.
They have a few more than that. Do the math.

The bandwidth quotas are sales stuff so that you will say exactly this in
threads like these, and it's amazing how well it works.

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martinald
To answer your question, 100mbit isn't much these days. This article says you
can get transit at $0.63/mbit. [http://drpeering.net/white-papers/Internet-
Transit-Pricing-H...](http://drpeering.net/white-papers/Internet-Transit-
Pricing-Historical-And-Projected.php)

Explain why despite wholesale internet prices collapsing, AWS continues to
charge the same with virtually no yoy decline? Azure et al also do this fwiw.
It's just gouging.

~~~
ranman
What? They decrease prices all the time... There have been something like 3
price decreases just this year.

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virtuallynathan
AWS has not decreased bandwidth pricing in a long time

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sagargv
How does Amazon implement instances like t2.nano? If there are 40 t2.nano
instances on a quad core physical machine, what happens when all the users
want 100% CPU, even if it's only for 10 minutes? Are instances automatically
migrated to a different physical machine if this happens?

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fulafel
EC2 can't do migration, that's one of the things Google Compute has over EC2.

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phamilton
Why not, I wonder? Xen has supported migration for close to a decade now. I
assume they don't use a compatible storage layer?

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supersan
I've tweeted to you twice and asked your customer support about this too but I
have never gotten a reply to it. So I'm asking you here.. When are you gonna
allow reserved instances for Indian customers?

Right now I cannot purchase reserved instances and so my bills are much much
more than what others are paying.

P.S. Here is the screenshot when I try to purchase. There has been no update
for 1 year now.

[http://i.imgur.com/oZAHMt5.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/oZAHMt5.jpg)

~~~
Zombieball
In all honesty I don't think it's in Jeff Barr's authority to release roadmap
plans or definitive answers to questions like this. My experience in the past
has been he has always been helpful in connecting you to individuals who may
be able to answer these sorts of questions. So I suppose it doesn't hurt to
ask.

Just don't get your hopes up :)

~~~
supersan
Whom should I contact then? Their customer support just replies with a canned
reply :(

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matt4077
This would be excellent if you could accrue more than the 72 minutes worth' of
CPU credits. At least my use case is 'low traffic, with the occasional link
from a high-traffic site'. These happen every few months, not every three
days. But they also last 36 hours or so, not 72 minutes. Total CPU usage is
similar, but it's distributed differently.

~~~
cperciva
There's a trade-off between how much they allow you to spike and how long they
allow you to spike for. They could have 20 t2.nano instances packed onto one
CPU; the longer you can spike for, the more likely it is that another instance
is going to end up spiking at the same time as you. I'm sure Amazon has looked
at the CPU-usage behaviour of millions of EC2 instances -- quite likely across
hundreds of billions of data points -- and picked this as a reasonable
tradeoff.

For your use case, I think autoscaling is probably the answer. Keep one
t2.nano running continuously but tell EC2 to spin up a new t2.large if you get
a burst of traffic.

~~~
matt4077
Yeah, they obviously put more thought into this than I ever will. Although
they offer instances with 40 (v)CPUs so I'd assume they could technically run
800 nanos on one of those and efficiently deal with such spikes? Either way, I
suspect their reasoning is more economical than technical, in that they know
full well that I can afford more than 5$/mo.

(which I'm taking to linode for now, but oy vey, AWS, we'll always have Paris)

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copperx
> more than 5$/mo. > (which I'm taking to linode for now,

Just curious, what does $5/mo buy you on Linode?

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matt4077
Check it out yourself:
[https://www.linode.com/pricing](https://www.linode.com/pricing). As I said,
"more than 5$", in this case meaning 10$, which gets me a CPU core and 24GB of
ssd storage. It replaced a dedicated server that was 50€/mo. That server had
probably 8 to 10 times the power but the vpn solution can scale within two
minutes if needed. I was also having suspected hardware trouble with the
dedicated server that the provider couldn't diagnose / wouldn't replace.

It's an incredibly boring setup that serves about 200 visitors on a normal
day, 2000 during a handful of spikes /year. I know I could probably run it
from a Casio watch but it generates six-figures of revenue / year so a bit of
overkill is justified.

~~~
copperx
Could you explain, if possible, how do you get six figures revenue from 200
visitors?

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siscia
Since we are talking about cloud provider, any experience with
[https://www.scaleway.com/](https://www.scaleway.com/) ?

Their price is so much cheaper and give to you bare metal ARM, but I can count
on them ?

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amock
I've been running a server for a few months without any issues. The CPU is
really slow, but the network seems ok.

~~~
siscia
Nice, what you mean by "slow" ? Just to have an idea, what is your workload ?
Serving and rendering html ?

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amock
I used one server as a Tor relay and another to server static files. The Tor
node used almost 100% of one core to server about 25mbps of traffic and there
wasn't enough load on the static file server to notice the CPU load, but
decompressing an xz file took many times as long as an x86 VPS I had.

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7ewis
Looks like the t2.nano isn't included as part of the Free Tier, seems a bit
strange?

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yeukhon
For my use case, t2.nano would be great but I need better network throughput.

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imperialdrive
wow, I must be doing something wrong... I have a single c4.4xlarge running a
single wordpress site at max 200 active users and still running into cpu
bottleneck... 1K+/mo sheesh.... I use t2.medium for DC's for 5 users and 5
servers lol... please let me know what a nano is good for?

not to mention, I need multiple 10+TB volumes, and magnetic only go to 1TB, so
I need to span, and spanning breaks after 4+ drives, so now I'm at SSD, and
that's costing me 1K/mo for each copy and I need many, sigh

i miss buying my own supermicro systems at ~10k/ea, hosting a full rack at at
a colo for 1k/mo and then just setup correctly and check-in once a month

now, amazon is getting 15k/mo from me, but i must say, my back thanks them for
0lbs of equipment to lift, so probably worth it for a hernia surgery.

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keehun
Do you cache at all?

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imperialdrive
i think my main issue is thread-safe vs non-thread-safe php and the issues it
has with IIS

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jon-wood
If you're using IIS one of your issues is that you're running WordPress on a
Windows server, and throwing away performance.

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jon-wood
Less flippantly, because I sound like a dick there, try putting Cloudfront in
front of the site. Assuming WordPress now properly sends cache control headers
it should drastically cut down on the traffic your actual server is seeing.

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tszming
Always add $49/month (the basic support plan) if you want to compare AWS with
DO/Linode, don't just look at the $5/month instance charge.

~~~
ranman
? meaning DO/Linode support for a $5/month customer is good? I've not had
positive experiences with either... but then again my experiences with AWS
(non-business) support haven't been so positive either.

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nickjj
I've had pretty good support on DO's $10/month plan and I imagine their
$5/month plan would be the same.

1-5 hour turn around times on initial responses and I've gotten them to enable
things like the recovery partition due to an instance running out of disk
space.

Sometimes it takes a few responses to get a resolution but at that price point
I can't really complain because they've even helped resolve issues that were
my fault.

