With all the price drops this year, I doubt I'll lock in as many reserved instances next year. I locked myself into higher rates for a long time, and paid more up front than they ask now too.
I think Amazon originally intended Reserved instances as a way to give customers lower pricing in exchange for accepting some of the capacity planning risk; but that has more or less been subverted by the use of Reserved instances as a disaster recovery strategy, where lower pricing isn't a major goal. It would be nice if Amazon could find a pricing mechanism which separated these two groups.
We reserve instances to guarantee that we will always have the minimum number of servers available to run our site. But where these price drops really matter to us are for Cloud Front and S3.
This needs more units, and perhaps some sort of absolute measure. For example "Amazon lowers outbound data charge from 12 to 10 cents per gigabyte." Or whatever it is.
for X in {5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9.5, 10, 10.5, 11, 11.6, 12, 12.6, 13, 13.7, 14, 16, 16.8, 17, 21, 22.1}, Amazon lowered outbound data charges from X to X-2 cents per GiB.
Yes, but linode is relatively expensive for storage. What I do now is asynchronously move larger files to s3, while continuing to serve thumbnails and medium-size photos from linode.
I wonder if the timing has to do with all the bad press Amazon had the last few days.
Now I know this was in a pipeline for a long time, there is no way you do something like this on a whim. But I wonder if they moved up the timing of the release of the announcement in order to get some good press going again
If you're using CloudFront and pushing over 1000 TB/month from the US and EU edge locations, the marginal price was cut by 40%.
... which I find rather annoying, really. Every time AWS prices are cut, it's the largest users who get the largest price cuts. What happened to the idea of "we can get good rates by buying in bulk, and then pass those rates on to all of our customers no matter how small they are" which AWS launched with?
Just because you didn't get the biggest percentage cut doesn't mean you still didn't get a price cut! Be grateful they are even passing this on to customers...they very well could have kept the extra .02 as added profit margin.
Oh yeah, it's only bad when Amazon tries to keep book prices low.