8 ms·

Vantage has acquired ec2instances.info

86 points by StratusBen 6y ago

fursund 6y ago
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/$.
- StratusBen 6y ago
  That's a great suggestion!
- wongarsu 6y ago
  I agree, vCPUs is really just an opaque proxy for CPU performance, having a CPU benchmark to sort by instead would be useful.
- myroon5 6y ago
  related: https://github.com/powdahound/ec2instances.info/issues/200 https://github.com/powdahound/ec2instances.info/issues/200
  - fursund 6y ago
    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.
whalesalad 6y ago
Please don't screw it up. I use this constantly.
- peculiar_throw 6y ago
  +1, it’s useful internally as a quick reference, too.
- StratusBen 6y ago
  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.
  - 3np 6y ago
    Good to hear! As a user: PLEASE don't increas ethe amount of tracking and analytics. Twitter is enough. Remove it if you need something else.
    - leesalminen 6y ago
      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”.
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    Expansion of a similar format into other cloud providers and other AWS product offerings would definitely be useful.
  - dygd 6y ago
    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.
  - planckscnst 6y ago
    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
  - mike_d 6y ago
    You will get a lot more SEO juice from that "Sponsored By" link by not moving it away from the original URL.
- aclatuts 6y ago
  Even if they do, it's on Github so anyone can fork away.
rospaya 6y ago
There's also an Azure version but it's been unavailable for me for some time - http://www.azureinstances.info/ http://www.azureinstances.info/ Does anyone know if it's made by the same folks?
- powdahound 6y ago
  Hey - ec2instances.info creator here. I only ran this for AWS and am not sure who may have run this Azure version, sorry!
renewiltord 6y ago
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.
- powdahound 6y ago
  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...
sho 6y ago
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!?
- encoderer 6y ago
  Heck yeah it can be worth a lot in SEO value and reaching an audience of people looking at EC2 prices. Total guess, but having some experience with transactions like this: $5-10k. Making a mental note to track the SEO impact of the redirect to a subdomain here.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  It’s worth enough to me to hope they don’t ruin it. I was using it every time I needed to check the info on some instance.
- rdhatt 6y ago
  > 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.
Fizzadar 6y ago
This has reminded me of a weekend project I made that compares AWS/Azure/etc in a similar table (https://providers.stacksetup.com/ https://providers.stacksetup.com/).
shaicoleman 6y ago
My wishlist: * Could you fix the arch column, it currently shows "64-bit" for both Intel and ARM. No way to filter only ARM. * Would it be possible to only show the latest generation? * Would it be possible to hide disk/network variants? (e.g. C5D/C5N) * Would it be possible to filter by CPU brand (Intel/AMD/Graviton)? * Faster initial loading * Quicker updates when AWS announces new instance types. * Filter ranges (e.g. 4-8 cores) * Dropdowns for filters (e.g. clicking on the arch will show all the options) * Better datatable implementation (e.g. ag-Grid), to implement some of the above suggestions
- random5634 6y ago
  fantastic suggestions! Mine: Option to do format with commas for thousands separator, only do dollars (no cents) for monthly and longer time frames.
- StratusBen 6y ago
  These are great suggestions - thank you! I just copied it over to our company Slack and we'll see what we can do!
- darren 6y ago
  Ooh, while we're requesting columns - it would be great to add Core count (different from vCPU). See here for data: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/physicalcores/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/physicalcores/
andrenotgiant 6y ago
Acquiring and maintaining/improving web tools seems like a good way to spend marketing budget if you're a developer-focused business.
yegle 6y ago
In the same category, there's a gcping.com testing latency between your browser and Google Cloud regions.
- crb 6y ago
  A Googler created that, but he's actually at Red Hat now. More relevant though: gcpinstances.info exists and does what you think it should.
  - opsunit 6y ago
    I built https://runson.cloud https://runson.cloud to help you identify which Cloud or CDN a site runs on in the first place.
petercooper 6y ago
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?
- dqh 6y ago
  What are the usual marketplaces for side projects?
  - petercooper 6y ago
    MicroAcquire, Flippa, Indiemaker, and SideProjectors are worth looking at.
- andrewstuart 6y ago
  Why would you have bought it and what would you think its worth?
monkin 6y ago
I would like to see one thing, approximate data transfer cost for instance with input field to write an amount to calculate.
kureikain 6y ago
I made some similar project https://ec2.shop/ 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.
- freediver 6y ago
  Perhaps also worth mentioning is https://cloudoptimizer.io 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)
- big-malloc 6y ago
  I use this project weekly! Thank you for building this, it makes it 1000x easier to estimate and plan projects.
nielsole 6y ago
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) Any more ideas?
- wmf 6y ago
  vCPUs are just hardware threads (or "cpus" in Linux) which also change every generation; it has never been intended to be a measure of performance.
- GrantZvolsky 6y ago
  I remember raising an issue[1] back in 2015 asking for the unit to be changed from `cores` to `vCPUs`. Small world. [1]: https://github.com/powdahound/ec2instances.info/issues/111 https://github.com/powdahound/ec2instances.info/issues/111
alien_ 6y ago
As a former contributor/co-maintainer and currently AWS employee I'm curious about your plans about the open source project behind the website. Do you have any plans to change the licensing and/or contribution model? Are OpenSource contributions as welcomed as before?
- StratusBen 6y ago
  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
- robbyt 6y ago
  As a current AWS employee, doesn't the popularity of this site prove the customer's demand for an official version to exist? And then since it doesn't exist, Isn't it safe to assume that AWS intentionally obscures pricing?
  - mrg2k8 6y ago
    A similar tool exists from AWS, the Instance Type (IIRC) inside the EC2 console.
  - alien_ 6y ago
    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.
georgebarnett 6y ago
As an aside, Garret Heaton is one of the co-founders of HipChat. Congrats on another exit mate!
- powdahound 6y ago
  Thanks! Initially created this when getting HipChat spun up on AWS. :)
gazby 6y ago
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.
- StratusBen 6y ago
  Hey, this is good feedback and likely a quick fix. If you email me (ben@vantage.sh) I can let you know when we have this support added.
  - gazby 6y ago
    That's super cool Ben, thanks! Email incoming!
- endgame 6y ago
  There is a method to the madness: -d is disk (instance store) -a is amd -ad is both -n is enhanced networking (ENA, or EFA on the biggest instances)
  - gazby 6y ago
    Hey thanks that is simpler than expected! 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!
    - rdhatt 6y ago
      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. https://stackoverflow.com/a/56880093 https://stackoverflow.com/a/56880093

86 points by StratusBen 6y ago

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/$.

StratusBen 6y ago
That's a great suggestion!
wongarsu 6y ago
I agree, vCPUs is really just an opaque proxy for CPU performance, having a CPU benchmark to sort by instead would be useful.
myroon5 6y ago
related: https://github.com/powdahound/ec2instances.info/issues/200 https://github.com/powdahound/ec2instances.info/issues/200
- fursund 6y ago
  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.

whalesalad 6y ago

Please don't screw it up. I use this constantly.

peculiar_throw 6y ago
+1, it’s useful internally as a quick reference, too.
StratusBen 6y ago
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.
- 3np 6y ago
  Good to hear! As a user: PLEASE don't increas ethe amount of tracking and analytics. Twitter is enough. Remove it if you need something else.
  - leesalminen 6y ago
    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”.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  Expansion of a similar format into other cloud providers and other AWS product offerings would definitely be useful.
- dygd 6y ago
  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.
- planckscnst 6y ago
  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
- mike_d 6y ago
  You will get a lot more SEO juice from that "Sponsored By" link by not moving it away from the original URL.
aclatuts 6y ago
Even if they do, it's on Github so anyone can fork away.

rospaya 6y ago

There's also an Azure version but it's been unavailable for me for some time - http://www.azureinstances.info/ http://www.azureinstances.info/ Does anyone know if it's made by the same folks?

powdahound 6y ago
Hey - ec2instances.info creator here. I only ran this for AWS and am not sure who may have run this Azure version, sorry!

renewiltord 6y ago

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.

powdahound 6y ago
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...

sho 6y ago

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!?

encoderer 6y ago
Heck yeah it can be worth a lot in SEO value and reaching an audience of people looking at EC2 prices. Total guess, but having some experience with transactions like this: $5-10k. Making a mental note to track the SEO impact of the redirect to a subdomain here.
Aeolun 6y ago
It’s worth enough to me to hope they don’t ruin it. I was using it every time I needed to check the info on some instance.
rdhatt 6y ago
> 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.

Fizzadar 6y ago

This has reminded me of a weekend project I made that compares AWS/Azure/etc in a similar table (https://providers.stacksetup.com/ https://providers.stacksetup.com/).

shaicoleman 6y ago

My wishlist: * Could you fix the arch column, it currently shows "64-bit" for both Intel and ARM. No way to filter only ARM. * Would it be possible to only show the latest generation? * Would it be possible to hide disk/network variants? (e.g. C5D/C5N) * Would it be possible to filter by CPU brand (Intel/AMD/Graviton)? * Faster initial loading * Quicker updates when AWS announces new instance types. * Filter ranges (e.g. 4-8 cores) * Dropdowns for filters (e.g. clicking on the arch will show all the options) * Better datatable implementation (e.g. ag-Grid), to implement some of the above suggestions

random5634 6y ago
fantastic suggestions! Mine: Option to do format with commas for thousands separator, only do dollars (no cents) for monthly and longer time frames.
StratusBen 6y ago
These are great suggestions - thank you! I just copied it over to our company Slack and we'll see what we can do!
darren 6y ago
Ooh, while we're requesting columns - it would be great to add Core count (different from vCPU). See here for data: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/physicalcores/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/physicalcores/

andrenotgiant 6y ago

Acquiring and maintaining/improving web tools seems like a good way to spend marketing budget if you're a developer-focused business.

yegle 6y ago

In the same category, there's a gcping.com testing latency between your browser and Google Cloud regions.

crb 6y ago
A Googler created that, but he's actually at Red Hat now. More relevant though: gcpinstances.info exists and does what you think it should.
- opsunit 6y ago
  I built https://runson.cloud https://runson.cloud to help you identify which Cloud or CDN a site runs on in the first place.

petercooper 6y ago

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?

dqh 6y ago
What are the usual marketplaces for side projects?
- petercooper 6y ago
  MicroAcquire, Flippa, Indiemaker, and SideProjectors are worth looking at.
andrewstuart 6y ago
Why would you have bought it and what would you think its worth?

monkin 6y ago

I would like to see one thing, approximate data transfer cost for instance with input field to write an amount to calculate.

kureikain 6y ago

I made some similar project https://ec2.shop/ 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.

freediver 6y ago
Perhaps also worth mentioning is https://cloudoptimizer.io 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)
big-malloc 6y ago
I use this project weekly! Thank you for building this, it makes it 1000x easier to estimate and plan projects.

nielsole 6y ago

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) Any more ideas?

wmf 6y ago
vCPUs are just hardware threads (or "cpus" in Linux) which also change every generation; it has never been intended to be a measure of performance.
GrantZvolsky 6y ago
I remember raising an issue[1] back in 2015 asking for the unit to be changed from `cores` to `vCPUs`. Small world. [1]: https://github.com/powdahound/ec2instances.info/issues/111 https://github.com/powdahound/ec2instances.info/issues/111

alien_ 6y ago

As a former contributor/co-maintainer and currently AWS employee I'm curious about your plans about the open source project behind the website. Do you have any plans to change the licensing and/or contribution model? Are OpenSource contributions as welcomed as before?

StratusBen 6y ago
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
robbyt 6y ago
As a current AWS employee, doesn't the popularity of this site prove the customer's demand for an official version to exist? And then since it doesn't exist, Isn't it safe to assume that AWS intentionally obscures pricing?
- mrg2k8 6y ago
  A similar tool exists from AWS, the Instance Type (IIRC) inside the EC2 console.
- alien_ 6y ago
  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.

georgebarnett 6y ago

As an aside, Garret Heaton is one of the co-founders of HipChat. Congrats on another exit mate!

powdahound 6y ago
Thanks! Initially created this when getting HipChat spun up on AWS. :)

gazby 6y ago

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.

StratusBen 6y ago
Hey, this is good feedback and likely a quick fix. If you email me (ben@vantage.sh) I can let you know when we have this support added.
- gazby 6y ago
  That's super cool Ben, thanks! Email incoming!
endgame 6y ago
There is a method to the madness: -d is disk (instance store) -a is amd -ad is both -n is enhanced networking (ENA, or EFA on the biggest instances)
- gazby 6y ago
  Hey thanks that is simpler than expected! 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!
  - rdhatt 6y ago
    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. https://stackoverflow.com/a/56880093 https://stackoverflow.com/a/56880093