11 ms·
EC2 Price Reduction (C4, M4, and R3 Instances)
- kevindeasis 11y agoDoes this mean Heroku will reduce their price too?
- joshmn 11y agoNope.
- maxehmookau 11y agolol
- PhilipA 11y agoDon't count on it. Amazon has previous had price reductions without Heroku following.
- Patrick_Devine 11y agoWith Moore's law now still continuing to double transistor counts every 2.5 years or so, if AWS was serious about passing on savings, it'd reduce the cost of EC2 instances by about 5% _every couple of months_. That's clearly not happening, and because compute isn't exactly fungible (despite being called a "commodity") thanks to things like subsidized data ingress, AWS is making an absolute killing. The margins, even after building huge datacenters, are ridiculous.
- sparky_z 11y agoWouldn't that only be true if they replaced/upgraded everything every few months? You'd have to factor in the cost of that. And of course, it wouldn't work that way anyway because Moore's Law isn't actually continuous. It's is a line drawn through discrete points in the timeline (new product launches from chip makers). Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but Moore's law doesn't say anything about ancillary costs like power/air conditioning. I have no idea what the trend is for those.
- discodave 11y agoIt doesn't matter what the trend is, it just matters that Moores law only applies to a fraction of the cost of a server, which is only a fraction of the cost of running DCs. http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/09/overall-data-center-costs/ http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/09/overall-data-center...
- discodave 11y agoCPU cost is only part of the total cost of an EC2 instance. According to James Hamilton who speaks on behalf of Amazon, Servers make up ~57% of the cost of running a DC. CPUs are only a fraction of the cost of a server, maybe 25%. So moores law only really applies to ~15% of the total cost of EC2. That's before factoring in all of Amazons capex to build the software that is EC2. Edit: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/09/overall-data-center-costs/ http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/09/overall-data-center...
- jandrese 11y agoIt's not like storage or network bandwidth are sitting still pricewise. Especially on the SSD front. What was a reasonable price 2 or 3 years ago for some amount of SSD would be considerably overpriced today.
- Patrick_Devine 11y agoYes, the CPU cost is only a fraction, however, the costs of the rest of server (ie. storage and memory) also is dropping precipitously, and has for decades. The cost of networking equipment and any network transit should be factored into the cost of network egress (which starts at healthy $0.09/GB). The capex on software is negligible, because the cost of duplication is effectively zero. AWS can scale to whatever size they want (as long as their software is architected correctly, of course), and not have to spend more cash. That said, I'm not faulting AWS for charging what they charge. They have a remarkable service. It's just hard to stomach a post bragging about dropping the price by 5% when they're effectively printing money.
- yazaddaruvala 11y agoDo remember Intel builds the CPUs, prices them, and basically has no competition. I have no education/insight at all into this matter, but I would keep that in mind and reconsider your assessment of Moore's law's direct influence on AWS' bottom line.
- cddotdotslash 11y agoWith AWS, you're paying for so much more than just the bare cost of the resources. Like it or not, things like CodeDeploy, Auto-scaling triggers, OpsWorks, Elastic Beanstalk and all the other services that are "included" ("pay only for the resources you use") are likely factored into the EC2 costs.
- wstrange 11y agoWhat I really wish the cloud providers would do is reduce network egress costs. They seem insanely expensive when compared to dedicated servers.
- thrownaway2424 11y agoYou're getting a fundamentally different quality of network from AWS or GCE than you get from Linode or similarly-sized dedicated provider. It's a good idea to question whether you need the network services of the large cloud providers, but it's not a very good idea to compare them as if they were apples and apples.
- iofj 11y agoAside from the fact that total egress for AWS is biggger and thus (slightly) more ddos resistant ... what exactly is the quality difference here ? There's plenty of dedi providers that are big enough to prevent real outages though. And it doesn't protect you as a customer, it just protects you from other Amazon customers getting ddossed, but Amazon doesn't keep your website reachable if you're getting ddossed (no dedi providers do).
- thrownaway2424 11y agoAWS has at least 23 points of presence and Google has at least 70. I think you are seriously underestimating the size of Amazon's or Google's networks.
- PaulHoule 11y agoWoohoo! I love R3 instances.
- ronreiter 11y agoME TOO!
- imperialdrive 11y agoPlease follow suit with SSD EBS pricing - 60TB should not be costing me 6k/mo.
- kondro 11y agoWhy? It's got 3+ redundancy and is simple & fast to snapshot to geographically redundant backups.
- mikeyouse 11y agoNot OP but you could literally buy 3 sets of 60TB hard drives every single month for less money.. There should be some economy of scale here, no?
- dangrossman 11y agoI don't know what kind of hardware Amazon uses, but it looks like 60TB worth of any kind of SSDs starts at $24K on Newegg. If they're provisioned 3X, that's 12 months to pay off the drives.
- chronic50 11y ago12 months is not difficult to hit.. M
- mikeyouse 11y agoYeah, my bad.. I read past SSD in the initial post, I was looking at spinning drive prices.
- iofj 11y ago3x redundancy doesn't actually require you to triple storage : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming(7,4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming(7,4) If you check out 3x redundancy, what does it get you ? Well, you can correct any 1 bit error (not 2, because you wouldn't know which version is the correct one). Hamming(7,4) with column encoding gets you the same (better in some ways even). Therefore would you really be lying to your customers if you told them you gave them 3x redundancy if you used Hamming(7,4), column encoded ? I'd say no. Because it gets them the same : any disk can fail, and you can rebuild the data. If you intend to serve your customers correct bitstreams in the case of bitflips on the disks, you'd need to read 2 disks even in the case of 3x redundancy, exactly the same as in the Hamming case. Of course, people might choose not to do that, but then you only have backups, not redundancy. What can go wrong with 3x replication reading from one disk is that your system updates the 3 disks based on information read exclusively from disk 1, which may turn out to be wrong data. But Hamming only costs you 175% storage, not 300%. That brings it to ~7 months. And with precomputed lookup tables Hamming decoding is far, far faster than reading from disk (even without I bet it would still beat it). Another huge advantage Amazon has is that EBS means they don't have to allocate SSD space unless a customer actually uses it, not just if they reserve it (and they pay for it when reserving it). So in practice you do what ? 100% overprovisioning is prudent ? Let's say compression, given that these are operating system images mostly, gets you another 30-50% or so. If they dedupe, they could get far more. On the other hand the newegg figure doesn't include power to actually use those disks (SSDs are cheap though). Amazon of course doesn't pay anywhere near full price there either. Then, actually putting stuff onto an EBS ... amazon charges for that. And of course, Amazon needs to develop a lot of software to make this happen. So there's various other things not counted here. So hardware costs for Amazon would be at most 2-3 months or so until they're repaid, no more.
- voltagex_ 11y agoDoes anyone know how the spot instance prices react to these reductions? For C4 and M4 I hardly ever use a normal instance.
- Patrick_Devine 11y agoI don't have any empirical data, however I believe spot prices wouldn't move. Spot prices tend to be relatively flat except for odd spikes which AWS uses to kick off people who use Spot as if were the same as Dedicated Instances. You're already getting 75-80% off the Dedicated price, so a 5% reduction isn't going to move the needle all that much.
- rmykhajliw 11y agoHonestly, I wish to have smaller instances like m4.medium or even m4.small, because right now I have no other option to use for autoscaling group as m4.large even if it's not more than 80%-90% underutilized.
- fred256 11y agoWell, there's m3.medium and the t2.* instances. Any reason why those won't work for you?
- bostik 11y agoNot OP, but I have some data and an answer of sorts. If you have a workload that is light on CPU but needier on RAM, m4.large is cheaper than m3.large; m3.medium may not do as it has less than 4GB. Also, in our experience t2.* instances can't sustain any reasonable network traffic, but they do work wonderfully for lightweight RESTful systems. So any workload which serves mostly cached data and needs 6-7 GB per node is best off with m4.large. At least for Ireland, in our experience a single m4.large can keep up with bursts of ~120Mbps and sustain around 65Mbps. We have two as edge nodes for one of our public services, and will probably add a third one soon. Cutoff point for sustained bandwidth is slightly above 70Mbps, after that it starts to stutter. The t2.* instances choke and throttle bandwidth way earlier. Finding the right instance type for a particular service always takes some time and experimentation.
- iofj 11y agoThis seems a worthless reduction. I tried having my online dedicated box on ec2 for a while, cheapest server. Bill per month $120 USD. Yes that is mostly traffic. It was over 200 the month I decided, foolishly, to host a video on a blog. Doing exactly the same on a dedicated provider: 10$ per month. With more traffic than I did on ec2. Also, it's an (atom powered) dedicated machine. Performance is far better. 4G memory instead of 1G. Disk space : 1T (of the rotating kind though), but of course I can have ramdisk now for most of the stuff. Compared to 100G SSD for 10$ on AWS. But egress traffic, that's what's costing me. Downtime since switching : 0 (but I will agree that it's lower quality. Not 12x lower though).
- jon-wood 11y agoIf you're running a single server then I agree, AWS is hideously expensive. That's not really their market though. They come into their own when you're running tens to hundreds of servers, with dependencies between each other, and a use for supporting services such as RDS and S3.
- ronreiter 11y agoNext time, use YouTube. :)
- supersan 11y agoI've tweeted to you twice and asked your customer support about this too but I have never gotten a reply to it. So I'm asking you here.. When are you gonna allow reserved instances for Indian customers? Right now I cannot purchase reserved instances and so my bills are much much more than what others are paying. P.S. Here is the screenshot when I try to purchase. There has been no update for 1 year now. http://i.imgur.com/oZAHMt5.jpg http://i.imgur.com/oZAHMt5.jpg
- rodionos 11y agoThe more SKUs I have sitting on the shelf, the more price reduction announcements I can make. The difference with Safeway however is that I cannot take those promotions back. On the other hand, why not? Should we expect to see AWS announce Mothers Day two-for-one t2.micro deals soon, while supplies last?