

Tips to reduce Amazon ec2 costs - vpuranik
http://aws-musings.com/7-easy-tips-to-reduce-your-amazon-ec2-cloud-costs/
Amazon ec2 costs can grow very fast if you are not mindful of the Amazon ec2 billing structure. We came across the following ways to save money at our company.
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garyrichardson
Best tip on the page is using CNAME's instead of A records. It's the least
obvious of them.

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spudlyo
Right. Although it wasn't clear what exactly they meant by using a CNAME. They
could have cleared it up greatly by saying using a CNAME to the official DNS
name of the elastic IP, i.e. ec2-75-101-137-243.compute-1.amazonaws.com.

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OmarIsmail
You can also use the internal IP address of the machine. i.e. with Windows
instances if you do an IP Config you'll see an address to the effect of
10.X.X.X. Instances in the same availability zone can communicate with one
another using these IP addresses without leaving the network. This saves
dramatically on costs and performance.

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spudlyo
Sure, you can do that, but hard coding ephemeral IP addresses into your
configuration is still problematic.

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phsr
On a somewhat unrelated note: there is a very interesting peak on spot history
for windows instances on Dec 16th, they jumped up to $200

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ericb
At some point I need to write a little script that lets you launch with a
"shutdown after" somehow. I blew a couple hundred bucks on forgotten machines
once. Oops.

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camwest
I wonder how this applies to things like EngineYard Cloud which provides an IP
address using dynamic DNS.

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davidu
Doesn't impact it. You can still determine the machine's internal DNS name
from EC2. Use that (or the RFC1918 IP address).

