7 ms·

Show HN: EC2 prices per GB of memory

113 points by bzz01 9y ago

bzz01 9y ago
I've built this page since I often just want to pick a spot instance type that gives me biggest bang for the buck. Amazon's own pricing page is still very confusing, and ec2instances.info is great but it is a static website and adding spot prices there is nontrivial. I've also fixed a few minor things that annoyed me, such as correct sorting by instance type (so that r3.16x goes after r3.4x) and added a mode to display spot savings vs on-demand. Would appreciate any feedback!
- jbverschoor 9y ago
  Best bang for buck is not at amazon.
  - chx 9y ago
    Right. So the Show HN page says you can barely go below $5 per gigabyte with on-demand pricing. OVH RAM instances consistently cost 1.33 $/GB for a machine with 30, 60, 120 or 240GB of RAM.
    - nodesocket 9y ago
      I havent looked at OVH lately, but are they really a cloud? Do they provide full VPC with central firewall? Dynamic network disk storage that can be mapped to servers?
      - mschuster91 9y ago
        How does EBS work, anyway? Is it some form of NFS with caching under the hood?
        eropple 9y ago
        It's not NFS, it's a block storage mechanism. NFS presents a file-based interface, EBS is a block/device-based interface. The underlying implementation isn't widely publicized, but if you think about how a block device works on a Unix and the AWS bigger-is-faster model for non-PIOPS EBS, you can probably draw some reasonable inferences.
        loeg 9y ago
        PIOPS?
        snuxoll 9y ago
        Provisioned/guaranteed IOPS.
        ty_a 9y ago
        IIRC EBS is based on GNBD.
        chx 9y ago
        Such rumors have been around for quite a while -- Amazon is not talking -- but their relevant patent https://www.google.com/patents/US8769186 https://www.google.com/patents/US8769186 has > For example, in at least some embodiments, a representative logical local block data storage device may be made available to an executing program via use of GNBD (“Global Network Block Device”) technology.
        floatboth 9y ago
        EBS is some kind of Network Block Device. NFS is another product, https://aws.amazon.com/efs/ https://aws.amazon.com/efs/
      - eropple 9y ago
        OVH does have their vRack stuff these days, but it's iffy and clearly intended for dedicated hardware. They have no block storage that I'm aware of.
        bryanlarsen 9y ago
        They do have it: https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/public-cloud/storage/additional-disks/ https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/public-cloud/storage/additional-di... It's OpenStack Cinder. They also have object storage, Swift: https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/public-cloud/storage/object-storage/ https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/public-cloud/storage/object-storag...
        eropple 9y ago
        TIL, thanks! Didn't realize OVH was OpenStack--that's a pretty hard no for me, because I've witnessed firsthand the failure conditions there, but I appreciate the correction.
    - eropple 9y ago
      If all you need is compute and RAM, then OVH dedicated machines are a great choice; I used them for a long time myself and would again for personal stuff. That said, it's important to remember that focusing on that to the exclusion of turn-key services (RDS has saved clients of mine tens of thousands of dollars in billable hours just by itself) doesn't do you so well once you need more than that.
      - shimon_e 9y ago
        OVH have a beta RDS-like service. https://www.runabove.com/index.xml https://www.runabove.com/index.xml
        eropple 9y ago
        When they have RDS and Redshift and and Athena and SQS and SNS and when they have a fully-functional API that crosses every platform I need to write code against and years of a proven track record of stone-cold simplicity and success, I am sure I will take that into account. Time is valuable. AWS/GCE/Azure have a huge head start in making us more productive.
- purespark2 9y ago
  This is very useful for me too. Thanks for putting it together! For me, it would also be nice to see the total price/time unit on the same table as the price/gb.
nodesocket 9y ago
Pricing is yet another area where Google Compute Engine is superior. Automatic sustained use discounts[1], the ability to commit long term to a certain amount of cpus and memory and get a discount without any upfront cost[2]. Extended memory[3], basically you can craft a VM instance of any size. Need just 1 cpu but 32 GB of memory, no problem. AWS on the other hand... A labyrinth of pricing tables, spot instances, EBS optimized, enhanced networking... Complexity. [1] - https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/sustained-use-discounts https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/sustained-use-discount... [2] - https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/signing-up-committed-use-discounts https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/signing-up-c... [3] - https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/05/Compute-Engine-updates-bring-Skylake-GA-Extended-Memory-and-more-VM-flexibility.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/05/Compute-Engine-...
- Cidan 9y ago
  Came here to post this -- moving our infra from AWS to GCP was the best decision I've ever made.
- zjfroot 9y ago
  Google Cloud maybe is superior in the pricing of compute, but it is actually more expensive on network egress traffic, object storage and block storage. I recently created a simple tool (http://theprice.cloud/ http://theprice.cloud/) to compare egress traffic, object storage, and block storage cost among AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. It seems like Googel Cloud is the most expensive one in egress traffic and object storage.
  - nodesocket 9y ago
    Except that Google Cloud cross zone and cross region (US) prices are much less than AWS. Ingress Free Egress inner-zone Free Egress cross-zone in the same region $0.01 Egress cross-region within the US $0.01 See: https://blog.elasticbyte.net/comparing-bandwidth-prices-and-network-latency-between-google-compute-zones-and-regions/ https://blog.elasticbyte.net/comparing-bandwidth-prices-and-...
mayank 9y ago
There's also http://ec2instances.info http://ec2instances.info which has RDS pricing as well.
dzdt 9y ago
Forgive me for a dumb question from someone who doesn't do cloud computing currently : the units are really $/GB/time period, yes? What is the time period? One hour? day? month?
- marcc 9y ago
  There's a selector on the toolbar, top right, that let's you choose the time period.
- boulos 9y ago
  AWS bills instances hourly; both Azure and Google Cloud bill by the minute (albeit with a minimum of 10 minutes). For data analytics that you want fast turn around time for, this ends up being a big deal: a 30 minute job is literally 2x less expensive than "round up to an hour". This also shows up in auto scaling of services, since a standard business day of traffic obviously only has a fairly short actual peak combined with what is ultimately fairly short term load. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
floatboth 9y ago
Would be nice to see $/GB at the same time as absolute $
softwaresteve 9y ago
Looks like Amazon thinks their pricing page / calculator needs help: https://jobfinder.amazon.com/job/504836 https://jobfinder.amazon.com/job/504836

113 points by bzz01 9y ago

I've built this page since I often just want to pick a spot instance type that gives me biggest bang for the buck. Amazon's own pricing page is still very confusing, and ec2instances.info is great but it is a static website and adding spot prices there is nontrivial. I've also fixed a few minor things that annoyed me, such as correct sorting by instance type (so that r3.16x goes after r3.4x) and added a mode to display spot savings vs on-demand. Would appreciate any feedback!

jbverschoor 9y ago
Best bang for buck is not at amazon.
- chx 9y ago
  Right. So the Show HN page says you can barely go below $5 per gigabyte with on-demand pricing. OVH RAM instances consistently cost 1.33 $/GB for a machine with 30, 60, 120 or 240GB of RAM.
  - nodesocket 9y ago
    I havent looked at OVH lately, but are they really a cloud? Do they provide full VPC with central firewall? Dynamic network disk storage that can be mapped to servers?
    - mschuster91 9y ago
      How does EBS work, anyway? Is it some form of NFS with caching under the hood?
      - eropple 9y ago
        It's not NFS, it's a block storage mechanism. NFS presents a file-based interface, EBS is a block/device-based interface. The underlying implementation isn't widely publicized, but if you think about how a block device works on a Unix and the AWS bigger-is-faster model for non-PIOPS EBS, you can probably draw some reasonable inferences.
        loeg 9y ago
        PIOPS?
        snuxoll 9y ago
        Provisioned/guaranteed IOPS.
      - ty_a 9y ago
        IIRC EBS is based on GNBD.
        chx 9y ago
        Such rumors have been around for quite a while -- Amazon is not talking -- but their relevant patent https://www.google.com/patents/US8769186 https://www.google.com/patents/US8769186 has > For example, in at least some embodiments, a representative logical local block data storage device may be made available to an executing program via use of GNBD (“Global Network Block Device”) technology.
      - floatboth 9y ago
        EBS is some kind of Network Block Device. NFS is another product, https://aws.amazon.com/efs/ https://aws.amazon.com/efs/
    - eropple 9y ago
      OVH does have their vRack stuff these days, but it's iffy and clearly intended for dedicated hardware. They have no block storage that I'm aware of.
      - bryanlarsen 9y ago
        They do have it: https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/public-cloud/storage/additional-disks/ https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/public-cloud/storage/additional-di... It's OpenStack Cinder. They also have object storage, Swift: https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/public-cloud/storage/object-storage/ https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/public-cloud/storage/object-storag...
        eropple 9y ago
        TIL, thanks! Didn't realize OVH was OpenStack--that's a pretty hard no for me, because I've witnessed firsthand the failure conditions there, but I appreciate the correction.
  - eropple 9y ago
    If all you need is compute and RAM, then OVH dedicated machines are a great choice; I used them for a long time myself and would again for personal stuff. That said, it's important to remember that focusing on that to the exclusion of turn-key services (RDS has saved clients of mine tens of thousands of dollars in billable hours just by itself) doesn't do you so well once you need more than that.
    - shimon_e 9y ago
      OVH have a beta RDS-like service. https://www.runabove.com/index.xml https://www.runabove.com/index.xml
      - eropple 9y ago
        When they have RDS and Redshift and and Athena and SQS and SNS and when they have a fully-functional API that crosses every platform I need to write code against and years of a proven track record of stone-cold simplicity and success, I am sure I will take that into account. Time is valuable. AWS/GCE/Azure have a huge head start in making us more productive.
purespark2 9y ago
This is very useful for me too. Thanks for putting it together! For me, it would also be nice to see the total price/time unit on the same table as the price/gb.

nodesocket 9y ago

Pricing is yet another area where Google Compute Engine is superior. Automatic sustained use discounts[1], the ability to commit long term to a certain amount of cpus and memory and get a discount without any upfront cost[2]. Extended memory[3], basically you can craft a VM instance of any size. Need just 1 cpu but 32 GB of memory, no problem. AWS on the other hand... A labyrinth of pricing tables, spot instances, EBS optimized, enhanced networking... Complexity. [1] - https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/sustained-use-discounts https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/sustained-use-discount... [2] - https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/signing-up-committed-use-discounts https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/signing-up-c... [3] - https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/05/Compute-Engine-updates-bring-Skylake-GA-Extended-Memory-and-more-VM-flexibility.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/05/Compute-Engine-...

Cidan 9y ago
Came here to post this -- moving our infra from AWS to GCP was the best decision I've ever made.
zjfroot 9y ago
Google Cloud maybe is superior in the pricing of compute, but it is actually more expensive on network egress traffic, object storage and block storage. I recently created a simple tool (http://theprice.cloud/ http://theprice.cloud/) to compare egress traffic, object storage, and block storage cost among AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. It seems like Googel Cloud is the most expensive one in egress traffic and object storage.
- nodesocket 9y ago
  Except that Google Cloud cross zone and cross region (US) prices are much less than AWS. Ingress Free Egress inner-zone Free Egress cross-zone in the same region $0.01 Egress cross-region within the US $0.01 See: https://blog.elasticbyte.net/comparing-bandwidth-prices-and-network-latency-between-google-compute-zones-and-regions/ https://blog.elasticbyte.net/comparing-bandwidth-prices-and-...

mayank 9y ago

There's also http://ec2instances.info http://ec2instances.info which has RDS pricing as well.

dzdt 9y ago

Forgive me for a dumb question from someone who doesn't do cloud computing currently : the units are really $/GB/time period, yes? What is the time period? One hour? day? month?

marcc 9y ago
There's a selector on the toolbar, top right, that let's you choose the time period.
boulos 9y ago
AWS bills instances hourly; both Azure and Google Cloud bill by the minute (albeit with a minimum of 10 minutes). For data analytics that you want fast turn around time for, this ends up being a big deal: a 30 minute job is literally 2x less expensive than "round up to an hour". This also shows up in auto scaling of services, since a standard business day of traffic obviously only has a fairly short actual peak combined with what is ultimately fairly short term load. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

floatboth 9y ago

Would be nice to see $/GB at the same time as absolute $

softwaresteve 9y ago

Looks like Amazon thinks their pricing page / calculator needs help: https://jobfinder.amazon.com/job/504836 https://jobfinder.amazon.com/job/504836