I made some similar project https://ec2.shop/ it even support a curl interface. My proudest achievement is spot instances pricing. You can use it to bid automatically spot price.
Perhaps also worth mentioning is https://cloudoptimizer.io which has resource pricing for many cloud providers (not just EC2) and also has a way to filter GPU instances.
(disclaimer: my passion project, new version coming soon)
Would love to know a ballpark figure for this acquisition. I mean this tool looks useful to some people I suppose - but the fact remains it's just a slightly more usable list of EC2 properties and costs. How much can it really be worth?
Not trying to sound snarky or look down on anything here. I'm genuinely curious. Cool tool. It's worth money!?
> it's just a slightly more usable list of EC2 properties and costs
For anyone who has to constantly (re)evalaute EC2 instances, this is a huge understatement. Now, I just looked at AWS EC2 pricing page and it looks way better than what I remember using in 2018.
Back then, for a given instance family, the specs and prices were on separate tables, making it maddening to compare. And forget comparing across instance families. instances.vantage.sh nee ec2instances.info made that so simple. Even the AWS ProServe employees that I worked with preferred it.
So AWS may have closed the gap but ec2instances.info is still superior since it offers advanced features such as "sorting" and "searching". The "Compare Selected" is super handy as well.
The biggest plus for Vantage is that ec2instances.info wired in to my fingers, I suspect that's true for a lot of AWS devs. By buying this site, they get a lot of eyeballs for their product. And frankly, it does make sense - Vantage is trying to selling you a better AWS console, this is a better pricing page, so it fits. The original dev gets some cash for a side project that was probably a huge headache to deal with. Win win for both parties.
Co-Founder of Vantage here: Priority #1 is not to screw it up.
As we mentioned in the blog post, nothing is changing at the moment but we are looking to add more functionality in time. Ultimately everything we do is driven by user feedback so please get in contact with us about how we may be able to help.
As you're adding features, please maintain a high bar on speed and efficiency of the tool. I would really hate to see this thing bogged down with lots of fancy/unoptimized js libraries in the name of adding features
This is a rule of thumb I’ve imposed on my product teams over the years. If you want to add (yet another) third party <script>, you have to be willing to drop one. It worked really well for us and forced product teams to focus harder on finding tools that tangibly help us as opposed to “looking cool”.
Thank you for the response. Regarding new features, I'd love to see Elasticsearch EC2 instance pricing added, to quickly get a ballpark month/year estimate.
We don't have any plans to change the licensing or contribution model. Open source contributions are still welcome as before. We aim to maintain the ethos of the project as much as possible.
The Github repo will be moving over to our organization this week and our employees will be looking at bolstering support moving forward.
I'm happy to answer anything further directly if you'd like -- just email me: ben@vantage.sh
I think relatively few key people at AWS realize the level of popularity of this tool, but I know of multiple AWS employees who are big fans of it and a few have also contributed to it in the past.
AWS has been offering the APIs that the website uses currently as its main data source and also historically sponsored some of the hosting costs.
There's now also a similar table comparison view (although maybe not yet as convenient/comprehensive) available in the AWS console, but it's under active development and improving all the time. As far as I know the intent is to eventually have that view cover this use case. The AWS console team is eager to get feedback from customers to help improve it going forward.
Always found ec2instances.info super useful. But found vCPU such a weird unit (that's on AWS of course), as it changes with every CPU generation. So I bought cloudinstances.info. Originally wanted to demystify the vCPU. Never got around to actually building it.
Anything you would like to see?
Was thinking of the following:
- some stock synthetic benchmark
- response times of "todolist" app in django, express, ... for real-world data
- all kinds of io latencies and percentiles
- detailed CPU info including cache sizes (and maybe even cache thrashing of noisy neighbours as probably not everyone uses cache allocation technology yet)
- comparing with some dedicated hardware (would be interesting how nitro compares to kvm based cloud providers)
This is the sort of thing I'd have acquired if I'd known it was on the market. Things like this never appear on the usual marketplaces for side projects in my experience, so do such sales tend to come from cold reach out?
Would be awesome to add some kind of benchmarking, and cost per said benchmark value. Making it easier to evaluate which instances to pick over others on perf/$.
Yeah ended up doing the exact same thing with a csv export->Google sheets. Still not quite good enough I think since the different cpus/gpus perform differently.
There are a lot of good ideas in this thread, but recently I've found I can't use ec2instances.info anymore because there's no description of the instance classes (and I can't keep them all in my head anymore. c5 is obvious, but what are c5n, c5a, c5d, and c5ad? Might be troublesome in a column, but maybe a popover on the name column or something could work.
I am glad to know I am not the only one who cannot remember what the families and letters mean! There appears to be no slow down in sight either. I created https://cloudhw.info/ out of a desire to track these values.
Still, apart from the obvious ones (m, c, t) there's also the myriad top-level classes that I'd have no idea about - like what is r, i, d, x, p, g etc. My brain is too puny for all that!
These are my mnemonics, pretty sure I'm not too far off though:
r = RAM. Instances are biased toward having more memory.
i = I/O. ... have fast SSDs.
d = DISK. ... lots of disk space.
x = XL. ... lots of RAM
g = GPU. ... have GPU hardware
...and of course now I realize this is already answered on SO. I'm keeping mine though.
This is definitely helpful, though I think the SO question showcases fairly well why someone would want the summary on the web page: Several are ambiguous and if you're not regularly exploring new instance types you're going to forget this or fall behind in your awareness of new types.
This must be like one of a handful of .info domains that is not immediately bucketed into "spam" for me. Don't know why, but that's what that TLD means to me.
Creator here. Agreed! I don't recall how I decided this was the right domain at the time but I think the rare .info TLD made it easier for people to remember. Can't say I'll be using .info for future projects however...
