
Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances now offer instance size flexibility - Elect2
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/03/amazon-ec2-reserved-instances-now-offer-instance-size-flexibility-helping-you-reduce-your-ec2-bill/
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cyberferret
Thank goodness for this. I buy a lot of reserved instances in our company to
cater for growth and client projects, and often times I'll have an inventory
of micro instances on standby when we need a couple of small or medium ones
for a short term project. I am happy to purchase excess small/medium reserved
instances if we can back port that computing power to multiple smaller
instances.

One more thing - can you make it easier for International customers (I am in
Australia) to on sell instances that are surplus to needs on the marketplace?
I found out too late that there is a requirement for a US Bank account in
order to sell spare or unused reserved instances, which is a PITA and affects
our long term planning.

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Elect2
May I know a rough cost percentage of ec2 and bandwidth on your billing? I'm
thinking of using Google cloud compute + AWS cloudfront, to benefit from
cheaper Google vCPUs. But that will almost double the bandwidth cost. I'm
considering is it worth to do so. For US bank account, you can try Payoneer, a
virtual card company. You can get a US bank account by using their "Global
payment service". I have successfully enable my RI selling by adding a US bank
account provided by Payoneer.

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cyberferret
Thanks for the tip - I will investigate it.

EC2 costs are by far the biggest cost in our monthly billing. Easily running
up to 80% of the total monthly costs. The rest is split fairly equally between
RDS, CloudFront, DynamoDB, Route53, S3, Glacier etc. Bandwidth itself is a
pretty tiny proportion. But then again, we don't do things like transport big
files around to/from clients etc. Most of our web apps are purely screen and
transactional information.

The biggest cost saving to us in the past few years was moving from on demand
instance pricing to reserved instance pricing. Easily knocked our monthly bill
down by more than half.

The tricky thing about reserved instances though (at least up to now), was
trying to predict what sort of capacity you would need for the next 12 months
or so. We did inadvertently spend too much sometimes on 'wrong' sized reserved
instances, and basically threw money away because we ended up paying out
_months_ on instances that we could not immediately use.

Once we get better at crystal ball gazing, we will probably move to 36 month
advance purchase of instances to save even more money.

Oh - one thing that tricked us too - it is not readily apparent on the Amazon
Console Reserve Instance purchase screen which instance types work within a
VPC and which don't. We ended up reserving a few instance types that we
eventually found out we could not use within our defined VPC, which was a
shame, though not a deal killer as we could use their "ClassicLink" feature to
work around it. Just a tip for any Amazon team member who may be reading.

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Elect2
Just now I noticed that Amazon send payment via wire transfer
([https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-
insta...](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-
instances/marketplace/)), but Payoneer bank account only accept checking. :(

If you spent so much on ec2, it really worth to take a look at Google cloud
compute 3-years term. In high-cpu set the vCPU is cheaper(less than $12 per
vcpu), and there is no upfront fee. What stopped me the most from AWS 3-years
RI is the huge upfront fee.

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org3432
This automates a bit of the manual work of resizing, which is good. GCE still
has a better model here where the longer you run an instance the cheaper it
gets, and they do per minute billing as well.

~~~
zbjornson
They also have a new committed use discount where you buy an amount of RAM and
a number of vCPUs and use them in any shape of VM that you want.

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abrookewood
Maybe I'm missing something .. what's to stop me from buying reserved
instances for the smallest instance within a class and then assigning these to
the largest instances in a class?

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joshma
I was wondering the same thing - my guess is that they added this hastily
(maybe that's the wrong word; I"m sure it's not trivial to change) and haven't
figured out how to remove all the sizes from the system.

If anyone else knows, that'd be helpful - I'm thinking of just buying a ton of
*.smalls...

// Edit: Oops, maybe I misunderstood the parent. Sibling's right; you'd need
256 small RIs to make up for one 32xlarge RI. I'm wondering why we should ever
buy 32xlarge RIs and lose granularity.

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abrookewood
OK, that makes sense - I missed the bit about normalisation.

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jakozaur
This help my life a lot. Buying RIs monthly give us a huge savings, but was a
huge headache.

First with Regional RIs I no longer have to worry about AZ and modifying RIs,
now I don't worry about RI modification to have right size.

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kyledrake
Is this seriously how complicated pricing is with "cloud" now? None of that
made any sense to me.

I pay $400/month for a half rack at a datacenter. Its regional RIs also
provide instance size flexibility in addition to AZ flexibility so you no
longer have to worry about being tied to a specific size or AZ, or worry about
launching the right instance size in the right AZ to match their RIs... or
something. $400/month.

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blaisio
The pricing is complicated, but not necessarily more complicated than the
economics of managing a datacenter. And if you don't actually own the
infrastructure, then it's also much easier to fix any mistakes you made while
planning.

Also, something like EC2 gives you much more support than a half rack in a
datacenter does. You need to look beyond the system specs.

~~~
kyledrake
This is the exact same argument for the dozens of hosting and even some
"cloud" providers (which is really just rebranded hosting) that are quite
capable of a) charging you the fair market price for what they're selling, and
b) offering it with simple, unambiguous pricing structures.

Even Google's Cloud (which I don't use and don't promote) has managed to
integrate long-term use discounts into their pricing structure so that you
don't have to engage in craziness like this.

And FWIW, I would much rather deal with the complexities of a datacenter than
specialize in the equal or greater complexities required to manage
proprietary, black-hole solutions like this that serve to lock you in by
forcing you to specialize in something that is not translatable to other
service providers.

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QuinnyPig
Disclaimer: I run a consulting company that fixes horrifying AWS bills.

By and large, this is going to make life a lot easier for most of my clients.

That said:

* You still have to watch out for generational changes ("Oh, you have a lot of reservations for i2 instances? That sucks, i3s just came out, are a third cheaper, and you can't use your RIs for them."), so 1 year is still where it's at unless you're doing something like writing your cloud spend as CapEx.

* You still need to figure out how your application profiles. Converting an m4 reservation to a c3 isn't happening.

* Smaller instance reservations apply to larger instances, and pro-rate the difference down to on-demand pricing. This is "the right thing," but it's going to make Amazon's already byzantine billing even harder to dissect.

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tomschlick
Fantastic. The competition in this space is going to be amazing over the next
few years.

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sandGorgon
Does this also work for RDS ? If we buy a certain reserved DB size..Can we
adjust that ?

