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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 mi

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.

hackits 10y ago
If 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    I suggest you qualify that you are in Australia... AWS pricing for bandwidth is easily 15x typical USA costs.
    - cyberferret 10y ago
      Apologies, I should have clarified that, but I was speaking within the context that I was replying to a user who said they lived in the NT (Northern Territory), which is the same state I live in in Australia. Actually you raise an interesting point - The price of bandwidth here in Australia is a moot point now, because only about 5% of our servers are within the AWS Oceania datacentre. All the rest are in the US data centres because most of our applications are applicable to a worldwide audience, and we wanted minimum latency for our biggest target market.
Elect2 10y ago
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.
- cyberferret 10y ago
  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.
  - Elect2 10y ago
    Just now I noticed that Amazon send payment via wire transfer (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-instances/marketplace/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-insta...), 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.

hackits 10y ago

If 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 ago
I 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 ago
  I suggest you qualify that you are in Australia... AWS pricing for bandwidth is easily 15x typical USA costs.
  - cyberferret 10y ago
    Apologies, I should have clarified that, but I was speaking within the context that I was replying to a user who said they lived in the NT (Northern Territory), which is the same state I live in in Australia. Actually you raise an interesting point - The price of bandwidth here in Australia is a moot point now, because only about 5% of our servers are within the AWS Oceania datacentre. All the rest are in the US data centres because most of our applications are applicable to a worldwide audience, and we wanted minimum latency for our biggest target market.

Elect2 10y ago

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.

cyberferret 10y ago
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.
- Elect2 10y ago
  Just now I noticed that Amazon send payment via wire transfer (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-instances/marketplace/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-insta...), 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.