5 ms·

New Medium Instance, 64-bit bit Ubiquity, SSH Client

75 points by jeffbarr 15y ago

dpdp_ 15y ago
Go 64-bit! A medium instance is actually a very nice option for small deployments. Micro instances are throttled -http://gregsramblings.com/2011/02/07/amazon-ec2-micro-instance-cpu-steal/ http://gregsramblings.com/2011/02/07/amazon-ec2-micro-instan.... I, personally, do not maintain any 32-bit AMIs. The offer gap between a micro and a large instance for 64 was large enough for me to feel it.
seldo 15y ago
It's weird that they would introduce the Medium instance as "new", when it's actually a return -- they used to have Medium instances a couple years ago, and retired them.
- firemanx 15y ago
  They've still had medium instances - I just spun up a few the other day. When did they retire them?
  - lukeschlather 15y ago
    AWS has a couple classes of medium. For a complete list, go here: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ In the API, the new one is "m1.medium" . The one you spun up the other day was probably a "c1.medium" .
pieter 15y ago
64-bit small instances are perhaps the best new announcement. We now have two different builds and AMI's for all our different node types, just so that we can use a small instance when necessary and a large instance otherwise. We can now drop half of our images and use 64-bit everywhere. The medium instances are also very welcome, since previously the gap between small and large was quite big (4x the memory for 4x the price).
- kolektiv 15y ago
  Very much agreed. The 64 bit ubiquity move is a solid, sensible step which genuinely makes a lot of lives easier. Nice to see this happening, and it comes at an excellent time for hosting decision I was about to make. Amazon have probably just secured that with this move.
- admiun 15y ago
  It's also handy in case you want to switch instance types. When instances are stopped you can change their type if they are the same architecture. This means you can now switch an instance around to all instance types they offer.
- ConstantineXVI 15y ago
  Especially if you're running a platform that dropped 32-bit support in it's latest release (WinServer); can keep all of our instances consistent now without being behind an OS release.
- garyrichardson 15y ago
  I remember being at a Cloud Unconference in Seattle about 2-3 years ago asking for 64bit for all instance types. Actually, I think I begged for it. It took a while, but I'm glad it's here now. I would have to say, Amazon is at least receptive to suggestions. You can always email or chat with Jeff Barr and make suggestions.
  - jeffbarr 15y ago
    Thanks Gary, I am always happy to listen to and to pass along suggestions. My email is in my profile.
Fizzer 15y ago
This is exactly what I needed. I'm currently using the Rackspace VM that gives 4gb of ram. I wanted to switch to EC2 after they dropped prices, but I would have either had to drop down to a small (1.7gb - not an option for my workload) or up to a large (7gb - costs over $50/mo more). With all of these improvements Amazon is making, Rackspace's VM offerings are now horribly overpriced.
roquin 15y ago
This is a great news. Before that, if you start with a small instance, there is no way to upgrade to higher instance since they exclusively support 64-bit. Now you can upgrade smoothly from micro to any instance.
ComputerGuru 15y ago
Typo in title: "64-bit bit Ubiquity" Other than that, exciting news. EC2 has always been about being able to choose a fitting solution for your particular needs, and this fills a niche.
teoruiz 15y ago
We have most of our workload running on Rackspace Cloud Servers (UK) and the more improvements AWS make, the more overpriced and ridiculously underperforming the Rackspace offer becomes: Underperforming: I don't get why the bigger Rackspace Cloud Servers don't get more CPU cores, just a bigger share of the original 4 cores on the host server. This might look fine but at the end I just want more processes (PHP threads) running at the same time. Overpriced: The pricing is really high for Cloud Servers. I'm paying around £460 a month for a 16GB RAM Cloud Server (4 cores, 620GB (!) disk). For around €448 I have a Rackspace dedicated server with 48GB RAM, 2 x 6 (modern) cores and a 480GB RAID10 array. I'm actually switching most of our workload to dedicated hardware, it's less cool but it's just cheaper and faster, in this case. NB: We tried AWS but the MySQL IO performance, either in EC2+EBS or RDS, was not enough for us.
- ericd 15y ago
  Hm, those dedicated prices are quite good, better than I'm paying at SoftLayer. Did you have to push very hard on the sales side to get that price? Have you been happy with reliability and support?
  - teoruiz 15y ago
    Not really, no. I had to push for the bandwidth prices, but not for the hardware. These are the detailed specs of one of those €448/month servers (Sep'11 prices) : - DELL PowerEdge R710 - 2 x Six Core Intel Xeon E5645 2.4GHz, 12M cache - 4 x 300GB SAS 15K RPM Drive (RAID10 controller with 256MB cache) - 48GB DELL RAM I would say their reliability is great on the dedicated side (their Cloud reliability is just OK) and their "fanatical" support is really good, as they advertise. Edit: just to clarify these are Rackspace UK (LON3) prices.
    - ericd 15y ago
      Thanks for the clarification! Was any bandwidth included in that price/setup? If not, that might be the reason for the difference.
- Erwin 15y ago
aaronharnly 15y ago
Also: the MindTerm Java SSH client! I can't think of too many cases in which I'd have my private key but no terminal to SSH from, but I like having this option. (Takes me back to bygone days of serving up MindTerm from my home computer over dyndns, a convenient way to do what I needed to do from restrictive school machines... Anyone else do that?)
jl6 15y ago
The first two changes feel related. What change do you suppose they made to their infrastructure that has enabled these features?
tyw 15y ago
This is excellent, I was just complaining about the 32-bit-only medium high-cpu instance types yesterday. Now I just wish they'd add another mid-range instance with ~3.75 GB RAM and 2x2=4 or 2x2.5=5 CPU. Basically combine the higher resources from each of the medium types.
firemanx 15y ago
These are welcome changes, but I really, really wish that new medium instance had 2 or 4 cores. I would pay a bit more for that, and having a single core is where many of our workloads really start to feel the pain, but we don't need all of the power (or cost) or a large instance. I understand the economics though - cores definitely cost a lot more than memory, so perhaps its just wishful thinking. EDIT: I should clarify - I know they already have the "High CPU Medium", but it would be nice to have a step between that and the Large instance type that had two cores, but slightly more memory.

75 points by jeffbarr 15y ago

dpdp_ 15y ago

Go 64-bit! A medium instance is actually a very nice option for small deployments. Micro instances are throttled -http://gregsramblings.com/2011/02/07/amazon-ec2-micro-instance-cpu-steal/ http://gregsramblings.com/2011/02/07/amazon-ec2-micro-instan.... I, personally, do not maintain any 32-bit AMIs. The offer gap between a micro and a large instance for 64 was large enough for me to feel it.

seldo 15y ago

It's weird that they would introduce the Medium instance as "new", when it's actually a return -- they used to have Medium instances a couple years ago, and retired them.

firemanx 15y ago
They've still had medium instances - I just spun up a few the other day. When did they retire them?
- lukeschlather 15y ago
  AWS has a couple classes of medium. For a complete list, go here: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ In the API, the new one is "m1.medium" . The one you spun up the other day was probably a "c1.medium" .

pieter 15y ago

64-bit small instances are perhaps the best new announcement. We now have two different builds and AMI's for all our different node types, just so that we can use a small instance when necessary and a large instance otherwise. We can now drop half of our images and use 64-bit everywhere. The medium instances are also very welcome, since previously the gap between small and large was quite big (4x the memory for 4x the price).

kolektiv 15y ago
Very much agreed. The 64 bit ubiquity move is a solid, sensible step which genuinely makes a lot of lives easier. Nice to see this happening, and it comes at an excellent time for hosting decision I was about to make. Amazon have probably just secured that with this move.
admiun 15y ago
It's also handy in case you want to switch instance types. When instances are stopped you can change their type if they are the same architecture. This means you can now switch an instance around to all instance types they offer.
ConstantineXVI 15y ago
Especially if you're running a platform that dropped 32-bit support in it's latest release (WinServer); can keep all of our instances consistent now without being behind an OS release.
garyrichardson 15y ago
I remember being at a Cloud Unconference in Seattle about 2-3 years ago asking for 64bit for all instance types. Actually, I think I begged for it. It took a while, but I'm glad it's here now. I would have to say, Amazon is at least receptive to suggestions. You can always email or chat with Jeff Barr and make suggestions.
- jeffbarr 15y ago
  Thanks Gary, I am always happy to listen to and to pass along suggestions. My email is in my profile.

Fizzer 15y ago

This is exactly what I needed. I'm currently using the Rackspace VM that gives 4gb of ram. I wanted to switch to EC2 after they dropped prices, but I would have either had to drop down to a small (1.7gb - not an option for my workload) or up to a large (7gb - costs over $50/mo more). With all of these improvements Amazon is making, Rackspace's VM offerings are now horribly overpriced.

roquin 15y ago

This is a great news. Before that, if you start with a small instance, there is no way to upgrade to higher instance since they exclusively support 64-bit. Now you can upgrade smoothly from micro to any instance.

ComputerGuru 15y ago

Typo in title: "64-bit bit Ubiquity" Other than that, exciting news. EC2 has always been about being able to choose a fitting solution for your particular needs, and this fills a niche.

teoruiz 15y ago

We have most of our workload running on Rackspace Cloud Servers (UK) and the more improvements AWS make, the more overpriced and ridiculously underperforming the Rackspace offer becomes: Underperforming: I don't get why the bigger Rackspace Cloud Servers don't get more CPU cores, just a bigger share of the original 4 cores on the host server. This might look fine but at the end I just want more processes (PHP threads) running at the same time. Overpriced: The pricing is really high for Cloud Servers. I'm paying around £460 a month for a 16GB RAM Cloud Server (4 cores, 620GB (!) disk). For around €448 I have a Rackspace dedicated server with 48GB RAM, 2 x 6 (modern) cores and a 480GB RAID10 array. I'm actually switching most of our workload to dedicated hardware, it's less cool but it's just cheaper and faster, in this case. NB: We tried AWS but the MySQL IO performance, either in EC2+EBS or RDS, was not enough for us.

ericd 15y ago
Hm, those dedicated prices are quite good, better than I'm paying at SoftLayer. Did you have to push very hard on the sales side to get that price? Have you been happy with reliability and support?
- teoruiz 15y ago
  Not really, no. I had to push for the bandwidth prices, but not for the hardware. These are the detailed specs of one of those €448/month servers (Sep'11 prices) : - DELL PowerEdge R710 - 2 x Six Core Intel Xeon E5645 2.4GHz, 12M cache - 4 x 300GB SAS 15K RPM Drive (RAID10 controller with 256MB cache) - 48GB DELL RAM I would say their reliability is great on the dedicated side (their Cloud reliability is just OK) and their "fanatical" support is really good, as they advertise. Edit: just to clarify these are Rackspace UK (LON3) prices.
  - ericd 15y ago
    Thanks for the clarification! Was any bandwidth included in that price/setup? If not, that might be the reason for the difference.
Erwin 15y ago

aaronharnly 15y ago

Also: the MindTerm Java SSH client! I can't think of too many cases in which I'd have my private key but no terminal to SSH from, but I like having this option. (Takes me back to bygone days of serving up MindTerm from my home computer over dyndns, a convenient way to do what I needed to do from restrictive school machines... Anyone else do that?)

jl6 15y ago

The first two changes feel related. What change do you suppose they made to their infrastructure that has enabled these features?

tyw 15y ago

This is excellent, I was just complaining about the 32-bit-only medium high-cpu instance types yesterday. Now I just wish they'd add another mid-range instance with ~3.75 GB RAM and 2x2=4 or 2x2.5=5 CPU. Basically combine the higher resources from each of the medium types.

firemanx 15y ago

These are welcome changes, but I really, really wish that new medium instance had 2 or 4 cores. I would pay a bit more for that, and having a single core is where many of our workloads really start to feel the pain, but we don't need all of the power (or cost) or a large instance. I understand the economics though - cores definitely cost a lot more than memory, so perhaps its just wishful thinking. EDIT: I should clarify - I know they already have the "High CPU Medium", but it would be nice to have a step between that and the Large instance type that had two cores, but slightly more memory.