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How can we assume Brightbox won't raise prices? How can we assume Amazon won't raise base prices, possibly affecting the spot market, then again this is a spot
by jjm 14y ago
How can we assume Brightbox won't raise prices?
How can we assume Amazon won't raise base prices, possibly affecting the spot market, then again this is a spot market! It's like asking how can you assume stock prices (not exactly equiv, but thats not the point) will go up or down?
How can we assume anything?
We don't. I think the assumption on the wrong feature to market is the problem here.
I only care that right now, EC2 spot are cheaper by a large margin. IF the price raises to match then I'll adjust. I'm not locked in.
- jeremyjarvis 14y ago@jjm both Brightbox and AWS have to give notice before increasing prices. Again, I maintain the hourly on-demand price is a fair comparison
- nphase 14y agoA fair comparison for what exactly? Many EC2 users optimize price for their usage characteristics heavily with spot instances. Sure, a c1.xlarge costs me $0.64 per hour, but I probably only need a few of those (at potentially a reserved price point) as a baseline. Instead of scaling those up and down, we choose to scale up and down with the c1.xlarge spot instances at a magical $0.052 per hour price point and only switch to normal on-demand instances when spot aren't available or the prices spike out of our target range (which, historically, is rare). Bottom line, comparing $0.64 vs $0.64 is fine for per-unit usage but doesn't paint the full picture when it comes to actually building scalable systems on EC2. Spot instances play a large role in that strategy.