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Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances now offer instance size flexibility
- boulos 10y agoGlad to see it! And for those AWS customers, you're welcome [1]. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. [1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/signing-up-committed-use-discounts https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/signing-up-c...
- vpol 10y agoGuys, you became so annoying on HN.
- temp246810 10y agoI don't know why you are being downvoted so badly, maybe you should elaborate on your point? I can see how it might be annoying but it's also probably for the best to have these guys commenting on here.
- boulos 10y agoSorry if that bothers you (those are often both me). I'm disturbingly addicted to HN, but more than anything I wish AWS would let their folks comment here more freely.
- temp246810 10y agoI changed the tone of my comment, or at least tried to. More power to you man, I think I was reacting more to the users benign comment being down voted than to your comments.
- origami777 10y agoThey don't allow that because it's easy for employees to come across tone deaf, kind of like you. You may not realize it but making comments on here like this can actually hurt the Google cloud brand. All it takes is one decision maker to think you sound too cocky to work with and you're out of a deal.
- dastbe 10y agoSo, people in AWS and other parts of Amazon are totally allowed to comment on social media. I do! that's not to say there's a lot of people commenting on social media in any offical capacity, because a lot of people don't want to mix work and personal time like that. I usually only put on my AWS hat when someone has a question and I know the answer, or when somebody says "X sucks". Not because I think they aren't allowed to say "X sucks" (because it probably did for them!), but because you can't really do anything with that. Why did it suck for you? What would make it not suck? To HN's credit, everyone I've asked to explain why their experience sucked has given pretty thorough responses, which is helpful for figuring out whats really important to all of ya'll.
- andrewguenther 10y agoWe can comment just fine, don't worry.
- vpol 10y agoNice post. Looks like an advert. Ask HN: Static Sites on Google Cloud https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13864566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13864566
- Elect2 10y agoCall me when google provide a service similar to AWS Certificate Manager.
- cyberferret 10y agoAWS Certificate Manager is a boon. Easier even than LetsEncrypt. Saved me over $1500 on wildcard SSL certs renewals this year alone!
- skyisblue 10y agoInterested in how it's easier than LetsEncrypt. Does it automatically renew your certificates?
- cyberferret 10y agoActually, no auto renew, but it is 12 month lifetime, not 90 days. Renewal is slightly quicker than initial setup, which is only a few mouse clicks on the console. No need to ever root access into the servers to set up auto renewal scripts. Attaching Cert Manager SSL certs to Elastic Beanstalk load balancers is a matter of a couple of mouse clicks too. Once again no need to fiddle with multiple servers that are spooled up or down based on demand to install LetsEncrypt client software or renewal scripts.
- origami777 10y agoWhat's funny is that the core of your offering is copied/inspired from AWS.
- boulos 10y agoEh. Neither Amazon nor "anyone" else invented the discounts for commitments model. We were very resistant for a long time (me especially), but customers simply demanded that we give them a discount if they'd promise to run 24x7 (and for databases that does make a lot of sense).
- andrewguenther 10y agoThe original commenter means that Amazon invented cloud computing as we know it today. You're welcome. Disclosure: I work on AWS (See how annoying that is?)
- boulos 10y agoNot at all!
- TheDong 10y agoJust keep digging; maybe it'll be more annoying once you've hit the lower crust.
- thr0waway1239 10y agoBut wait. Google created the internet so Amazon can now do business. And Apple invented the PC so both Amazon and Google can do business. Knuth invented computer science so all three of them can engage in business. And von Neumann was Knuth's daddy, because he basically invented computing, without which none of you would have done anything particularly useful. And as von Neumann's ghost, I have a message for y'all: "Stop it, you pathetic loser chumps! Y'all are too stupid to even identify real innovation if it came and slapped you in the face all day"
- curiousDog 10y agoCan you please stop? Your plugging is honestly spamming. You're doing this on every post related to Azure and AWS. What would the comments section become if every engineer working on AWS, Azure and GCE starts plugging their own clouds?
- AtheistOfFail 10y agoI don't know man, come over to Digital Ocean and try our newer instance [1]. Disclosure: I work for theonlinepornsite.com [1] http://www.digitalocean.com/referal/theonlinepornsite http://www.digitalocean.com/referal/theonlinepornsite Edit: Seriously, you guys are no fun.
- RKearney 10y agoThis is extremely unprofessional. Should all the AWS and Azure employees post "You're Welcome" once we see a HN post about Google Cloud finally getting around to supporting IPv6?
- plandis 10y agoThis is the same guy gloating during the S3 outage a few weeks ago, just ignore and more on.
- boulos 10y agoHonestly, yes. Competition is great. There's a difference between "commercial terms we choose not to offer" and real technical effort, but I've repeatedly admitted and cursed our failures.
- manigandham 10y agoYour comments are helpful, especially on the GCP threads. However nuance is very important in how you convey your message and your original post just wasn't in good taste. If you had said: "GCP also released a similar pricing model last week, it's great to see competition" - the reception here would've been vastly different. Please consider that for your future posts.
- VelNZ 10y agoThis is advertising, it doesn't belong on a discussion forum. It makes me much less likely to use Google Cloud.
- cyberferret 10y ago+1 It doesn't engender trust or goodwill towards the vendor. I had thought about experimenting with GC, but now think I will simply stick to AWS and Digital Ocean - you know, companies that quietly just get on with their thing...
- manigandham 10y agoThat HN comment wasn't the greatest but yours says even more if you base your technology decisions on it.
- cyberferret 10y agoWhy yes, I completely forgot that nobody on this planet ever bases their buying decisions on frivolous things like trust, ethics and the spirit of fair play & doing the right thing??
- manigandham 10y agoYou were able to accurately judge the trust and ethics of the entire Google Cloud organization, full of thousands of people and billions in R&D and commercial offerings, based on a single comment?
- cyberferret 10y agoMillions and millions of people every day make their decision to continue custom with a major multi national corporation based on their interactions with people at the very bottom of the organisational chart, such as checkout staff, ticket inspectors, gatekeepers and telephone support personnel. It is human nature. Part of life. I am assuming you don't work in a sales or marketing capacity, nor run your own business if you don't believe this is the case. In my situation, I am extremely happy with DO and AWS. Using GC was not a 'need' case, merely a curiosity and in an experimental capacity to see if it offered anything more than the incumbents. It won't take much at all for me to ascertain that it is not worth my time and effort. Yes, A snarky comment from a representative on a public forum is enough to tip the scales.
- jijojv 10y agoI liked the link for my TIL. AWS has lowered prices whenever GC steps up, so thanks GC.
- cyberferret 10y agoThank 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.
- hackits 10y agoIf you dont mind me asking, what type of application/webservices do you actually run on the Amazon EC2? I work in the NT, and we have our own self hosted servers using tomcat as the servlet container. Eg.. Spring/Hibernate/ ect.. Although I find it hard to see how you could leverage those heavy weight systems (gig's in memory to Amazon's EC2?
- cyberferret 10y agoI don't mind at all. We run several web application and database servers on AWS. We used to try and do it all in house, on a rack of IBM xServers, but the cost was just too high, and the bandwidth too expensive. Some of our web app URLs are in my bio still, I believe (I don't want to repost here in case it is considered promotional spam). They are mainly Ruby/MySQL type apps and the memory requirements are not high, but we need uptime availability and bandwidth, plus ability to scale up and down as demand changes. Feel free to contact me on Twitter @dsabar if you want to discuss in depth.
- patrickg_zill 10y agoI suggest you qualify that you are in Australia... AWS pricing for bandwidth is easily 15x typical USA costs.
- sandGorgon 10y agoDoes this also work for RDS ? If we buy a certain reserved DB size..Can we adjust that ?
- tomschlick 10y agoFantastic. The competition in this space is going to be amazing over the next few years.
- abrookewood 10y agoMaybe 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?
- joshma 10y agoI 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.
- abrookewood 10y agoOK, that makes sense - I missed the bit about normalisation.
- wmf 10y agoDue to normalization that would only cover 1/256th of the cost. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-instance-size-flexibility-for-ec2-reserved-instances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-instance-size-flexibili...
- thezilch 10y agoThe example gives [with my annotations] "m4.2xlarge [8 core] US East [...] can automatically apply to 2 m4.xlarge [4 core] instances in us-east-1a [AZ flexible] or 4 m4.large [2 core] instances in us-east-1b [AZ, again, flexible]". You reserve larger instances and can slice it up however you want with instances equal or lesser in core [and memory] size. The bigger win, for me, is the AZ flex, as it is a pain to manage multi-AZ setups.
- boulos 10y agoJust for clarification, that aspect was launched a few months ago: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/09/amazon-ec2-convertible-reserved-instances-and-the-reserved-instance-regional-benefit/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/09/amazon-ec...
- kyledrake 10y agoIs 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.
- kyledrake 10y agoAh the classic anti-cloud post that pretends to understand everyone's use cases and economics. You realize that everyone knows how expensive this stuff is. You realize that people plan and model growth around these figures. You realize that despite all of this, many people still go with cloud solutions because they get other benefits. I mean ffs, I would be laughed out of the room if I went to my investors and said we were putting everything in a datacenter. The historical statistics are that datacenters are far more likely to be a risk to the business than AWS is. It's as simple as that. Out of curiosity, do you really think that operating cost is the only metric that matters from a business standpoint?
- blaisio 10y agoThe 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 10y agoThis 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.
- jakozaur 10y agoThis 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.
- org3432 10y agoThis 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 10y agoThey 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.
- QuinnyPig 10y agoDisclaimer: 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.