
New T3 Instances – Burstable, Cost-Effective Performance - runesoerensen
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-t3-instances-burstable-cost-effective-performance/
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jaytaylor
When I first read this headline I had a flashback to the late 90's / early
2000's. It was a time when the term "T3" unambiguously meant only one thing: a
blazing fast, very expensive, dedicated network connection!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-carrier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-carrier)

Then a few years later the even fatter optical pipes came along - OC1 and OC3
lines.

My, how times change! ..Well, some things do. If you want a T3 line, they're
still available, and today will cost you in the neighborhood of
$3,000USD/month (down from $10-15K/month around Y2K).

What a bargain :)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+does+a+t3+line+cost](https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+does+a+t3+line+cost)

~~~
exikyut
Wow, 45-90Mbps for $3k-$6k/mo.

~~~
chillidoor
When I started my IT career in South Africa the internet situation was pretty
horrendous. ADSL/Broadband speeds were 384kbps and you had hard bandwidth caps
of ~$7 per gigabyte of traffic on top of your line rental.

Companies and universities could, however, cough up for expensive
alternatives, such as a diginet line which the ISP I worked for at the time
offered. These guaranteed uptime (which was very appealing as ADSL outages
were very common) but you paid a hell of a lot of money per 64kbps of uncapped
bandwidth. You were looking at something like $400-$500 a month per 64k for
the cheapest support package. And we weren't even the most expensive. There
was a law firm that was paying something like $30k a month for their pimped
out 2048kbps line.

Thank God things have improved dramatically there in the last decade (at least
in terms of internet speeds).

~~~
exikyut
Wow, so all this was happening circa 2006?

~~~
chillidoor
And before. Most people were still on dialup until I think maybe 2010-2012.
Wireless ISPs became really popular during all of this because they could
offer better service, better uptime, better speeds, and QOS for things like
VOIP. Bandwidth and data usage management became so important that ISPs were
also selling managed proxy servers and on-premise email servers to businesses
because it was cheaper than having to pay for additional 1GB data caps.

The two primary causes for this situation was that the sole wireline telecomms
company in SA and there were only 2 undersea data cables connecting SA (and I
think Africa) to the rest of the world. Telkom was semi-private and state-
owned so they had no incentive to improve things and also had to pay through
the nose for access to the two undersea cables.

However, things started to improve when more undersea cables got laid down
(lowering bandwidth prices and improving international bandwidth) and the
government started lowering entry barriers so that Telkom stopped being such a
monopoly.

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marcinzm
>If the instance runs at higher CPU utilization for a prolonged period, there
will be an additional charge of $0.05 per vCPU-hour.

This seems to be the same as the T2 unlimited instances. Interesting that it's
now the default and only (?) option.

~~~
rubbingalcohol
I'm not sure I understand, they're basically selling you less than one
continuous CPU thread and upcharging if you use a full core? So suppose the
machine has 56 cores and they're putting 3 customers on each vCPU. What
happens in the case that everyone needs to burst to the full performance of
each thread they're paying for (56 * 3)? I imagine they'd price that as if you
utilized 100% but give you degraded performance due to hardware limitations.

Please correct me if I'm wrong but this sounds like "unlimited shared hosting
for people who can SSH" (except you pay extra instead of unlimited)

~~~
awsinside
T2 and T3 use live migration to get around this, but it's not public
knowledge.

~~~
dagenix
Why doesn't ec2 support live migration for more instance types?

~~~
lozenge
Why would they? None of the others are oversubscribed so it is guaranteed that
the physical machine has the resources to provide everything that the virtual
machine wants. Except network, but AWS doesn't guarantee anything about
network speed.

In the case of hardware failure, say a malfunction or an error detected by ECC
RAM, most people would prefer the machine to be turned off and they can
restart it, rather than continue in a potentially corrupted state. As all the
storage is network attached, it can immediately be restarted on another
physical machine.

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fovc
Looking at 1yr reserved fully upfront pricing, the price cuts were ~9% across
the board (except 10% for micro and 7% for nano).

This seems like a big improvement for nano, micro, and small which now have 2
vCPUs and the same credits and memory as before.

However, the larger instances are stuck with the same vCPUs and memory, but
less than half the CPU credits!

~~~
antaviana
The 9% decrease is only for Linux. For Windows, there is a significant price
increase.

For example, for Windows (VPC), a t3.2xlarge reserved for 1 year is a 19.21%
more expensive than a t2.2xlarge.

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King-Aaron
Did anyone listen to the 'Amazon Polly' audio that accompanied the article?

I haven't used any of Amazons text-to-speech apps before now, but I found it a
little creepy with the way it "inhales" between sentences...

Also, it pronounces "Gigabyte" as "Gibabyte" and "Ji-be-bies" (2:55). This
made me giggle.

------
brad0
How does this compare price wise with t2 instances?

It specifies how cheap the t3s can be but not the difference between t2 and
t3.

~~~
gregdunn
You can find pricing details at [https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-
demand/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/)

Pricing varies from region to region, on-demand vs. reserved instance, etc.

The general answer is they are cheaper than the same sized t2 version.

(Disclosure: I work at AWS, not posting in an official capacity)

~~~
philliphaydon
Will these be available for RDS?

~~~
rcaught
An RDS T2 is not an EC2 T2. Just named similar.

~~~
philliphaydon
Except T3 would imply newer underlying hardware.

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andrewstuart
So what would be the benefit of running a T3 nano instance over a T2 nano
instance? The price is almost the same. Is T3 faster?

~~~
jedberg
Newer more efficient hardware. Workloads finish faster.

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kennydude
Bursting can cost up to an extra $37.5/month per instance. Bettrer make sure
you keep an eye on that CPU usage

~~~
blasdel
You only start getting billed long after your instance would have been
throttled in the Standard model (or if you terminate with a surplus balance)

If your CPUCreditBalance didn't normally get near zero before it's mostly just
insurance against grey failures. It also makes the credit model radically
easier to reason about.

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babaganoosh89
I hope this gets Google Cloud to expand their burstable offering.

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BeeOnRope
Do these instances support AVX-512?

~~~
casperb
Yes, Amazon says so in the linked article

~~~
BeeOnRope
Thanks, I guess I failed the RTFA test.

I had assumed that this detail is normally hard to dig up, so it is nice to
see Amazon being up front and clear about it.

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benologist
AWS nets $20+ million _a day_ in profit so these new machines will probably
help us save like Amazon warehouse workers save on toilet breaks by pissing in
bottles.

