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New EC2 Standard Instances and Price Reductions
- cperciva 14y agoAlways nice to see new options, but I wish Amazon hadn't dropped the ephemeral disk. Quite apart from the issue of surviving EBS failures, ephemeral disks are wonderful for swap space -- since the lifetime of swap exactly matches the lifetime of ephemeral disks. I even have a startup script in FreeBSD which autoconfigures swap space striped across a few GB of ephemeral disks.
- JoachimSchipper 14y agoStupid question: is that in the article, or..? I seem to have missed it.
- cperciva 14y agoNot in the article. On the EC2 website: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
- nilsbunger 14y agoSpecifically, the new instances (m3.*) are only available with ebs. There is probably a technical reason for this - eg maybe they move these bigger instances around to different servers so they can't be on local disk? Would love to know why...
- cperciva 14y agoI'm guessing that Amazon has wanted to phase out ephemeral disk on non-HPC instances for a long time, since it costs them money and most people don't use it; and the availability of EBS-optimized instances and provisioned-IOPS disks was what they needed to satisfy the people who insisted that ephemeral disk was the only way to get reliable I/O performance. And I'm sympathetic to that argument where large amounts of disk are concerned... but I do wish we could have a small amount of ephemeral disk to be used for swap space.
- kelnos 14y agoI think there's a reliability argument to be made as well. Most (all?) of the EC2 outages and partial outages over the past year or so have had their root cause somewhere in EBS. It's also why I hesitate to touch ELBs or RDS, since they both rely on EBS.
- raverbashing 14y agoMy guess is that ephemeral disks were dropped because of too many people losing data on them. Not because of a fault, but because they don't know instance disks are ephemeral. Permanent storage as a default is a saner default as well.
- cynicalkane 14y agoI think it's moot. For heavy users, the use case for ephemeral disk is better served by their I/O instances. For light users, I think Amazon is betting that EBS is 'stable enough' by now. If you really don't like EBS, there's always the old instances, Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB...
- paulsutter 14y agoAll of the disk performance benchmarks (iops, throughout, buffered vs unbuffered) I ran on ephemeral disks matched exactly the performance of ebs. That could be a coincidence that my tests ran only on machines without local disk, but more likely ephemeral disk was really just EBS in most cases. So it always seemed like a silly or even misleading product to me.
- cperciva 14y agoI've never seen ephemeral disks die during an EBS outage. Also, they don't cost anything for I/Os.
- jspthrowaway 14y agoEphemeral is definitely not EBS, as its I/O does not contribute to saturating an instance's network connection (I've tested that). EBS has a ceiling for throughput (the instance's network throughput) and competes with your other network traffic, which is interesting for database workloads for obvious reasons. In addition, every single benchmark I've seen run reports ephemeral behaving very differently from EBS. As ephemeral disappears when you stop an instance (presumably, when the system is given the opportunity to relocate your instance to another machine), I've always suspected that ephemeral storage was part of local disks on the virtual host's chassis -- as opposed to a SAN or other kind of network-attached storage. As such, you probably end up with the same unpredictable performance you find in all virtualized resources, since it is very unlikely that Amazon is giving you your own storage. Before benchmarking ephemeral storage you have to pre-warm it, which might have contributed to your findings. Ephemeral is worlds better than EBS, particularly in outage scenarios; if I could convince everybody on planet Earth to stop using EBS, it would be a noble cause.
- paulsutter 14y agoHmm, I have been told by Amazon and confirmed in my testing that EBS is immune to the network throttle (unlike machismo to machine tcP, s3, etc)
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- newhouseb 14y agoYeah, applications servers (read: web front-ends) can easily run entirely from memory, so it's annoying to have the rest of the OS dependent on EBS when it really needn't be. (Although to be honest I'm not aware how easy or hard it is to pull out the hard disk from a booted instance without customizing the kernel).
- saurik 14y agoIt is quite possible that this is specifically why these new instance types can exist: as a lot of users don't use the ephemeral drives at all, even for swap, you can now build a new set of servers that are just CPUs and network cards, getting rid of the large disk drive; some tradeoff has to be made to increase some of the stats but not the price, and saying it is a shame that they didn't include everything seems to then miss the point.
- csense 14y ago> some tradeoff has to be made to increase some of the stats but not the price I disagree. According to Wikipedia, it's been six years since EC2 launched. Since 2006-equivalent hardware is much cheaper in 2012 due to Moore's Law, (or alternatively the specs you can buy with a given number of dollars in 2012 is much better than it was in 2006), and since the original EC2 machines have probably been in service long enough to generate sufficient revenue to recover their upfront investment and make a profit, it wouldn't be unreasonable for Amazon to start retiring those old machines and use the better price/performance point of new hardware as a business justification to give customers some combination of price breaks and spec upgrades.
- saurik 14y agoThat would make sense across the board; in this case, you have to just compare the price point between different current offerings; these new instance types are similarly priced yet with higher specs in some areas, and I will argue that it is a tradeoff against the disks. If you feel like Amazon should be cheaper overall due to Moore's law (and remember: they have lowered their prices numerous times since they launched on everything from hardware to bandwidth), then the price of the things we are comparing to would also be cheaper (as these are all just virtualized subsets of larger machines).
- redegg 14y agoThat's strange. Did they upgrade the Micro instance's memory too? > The Micro instance (1.7 GB of memory) is great for lower throughput applications and web sites. I assume its a typo. Otherwise, fenomenal news!
- notatoad 14y agospeaking of typos... the word you're looking for is phenomenal
- meritt 14y agoThat spelling is correct in Spanish and Portuguese, my assumption is it was an untranslated correct spelling not so much a typo.
- recuter 14y agoThe Micro instance remains at 613MB according to: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ So looks like a type-o sadly.
- jeffbarr 14y agoTypo - Fixed, but only because my back went out and I can't sleep.
- capo 14y agoI heard a rumor that Compute Engine was supposed to open to everyone today, I suppose this reinforces that rumor.
- ridruejo 14y agoCan you provide more details / URL?
- nilsbunger 14y agoToo bad they didn't reduce any of the reserved instance pricing. So effectively they've reduced the cost for things that scale up and down a lot, but not for permanent base load.
- vyrotek 14y agoI'm not sure why this is a surprise. Real 'clouds' in my opinion are all about elasticity. If you can't benefit from that then you're wasting your money and should host elsewhere.
- adpowers 14y agoBecause most users have a relatively fixed base load, and buying reserved instances for that base load lets you save lots of money. The ideal setup would look like: reserved instances for base load, on-demand for natural daily curves, and spot instances for batch or price sensitive work.
- NoPiece 14y agoI like that the new instance types have a more balanced ratio of memory to ecu, but wish they had included some smaller sizes. I'd like an m3.medium with 4gb and 4 ecu (or an m3.large with 8gm and 8 ecu).
- shimms 14y agoPity they didn't introduce smaller High I/O instance types. I would love High I/O but don't need anywhere near 60Gb RAM :/
- NoPiece 14y agoIt would be interesting if they could get rid of "types" concept, and just let people pull together memory, ecus, and storage on demand.
- cperciva 14y agoThat would be a provisioning nightmare, trying to figure out which partially-used-up box to place a new instance into. Much easier to slice them into fixed sizes.
- NoPiece 14y agoIt definitely would be a nightmare! But they have a big enough pool of hardware and users that it might be possible. As it is, there are inefficiencies because of the lack of choice. For example, I had some large instances because I wanted at least 4 ECUs, and needed 4GB of ram. I had to take on the extra memory even though I didn't need or use it. Now I am using high cpu medium instances, but would gladly pay a little more for an extra gig or two of memory.
- rbanffy 14y agoSomeone's provisioning nightmare is someone else's business opportunity ;-)
- mkuhn 14y agoCloudsigma (www.cloudsigma.com) is trying to grasp that opportunity.
- akh 14y agoSoftLayer do this with their cloud servers, but I can imagine most companies would use that to build standard 'types' for themselves and re-use them.
- robryan 14y agoNo price drop for US West California though?
- akh 14y agoNope, we just re-ran our scrapers (in PlanForCloud) and noticed that... only US-East and US-West Oregon have been reduced.
- kalininalex 14y agoWe switched to Oregon once we discovered the price advantage and never looked back. Granted, our deployment is relatively small right now.
- jeaguilar 14y agoWhat's your latency experience been? Is yours a public-facing deployment?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ForFreedom 14y agoIts good for small users. How does 0.0x effect a saving for others.
- antirez 14y agoFor some reason that is currently unknown to me (did not investigated) this instances are much better with Redis since they are able to fork using more or less 1/20th of the time needed before. (4.4 GB process forked into 44ms instead of 1 second). EDIT: it's just hardware virtualized mode (HVM).
- EwanToo 14y agoIt's great that EC2 prices are coming down, but they're really not keeping up with the general trend in computing prices. If you're running a static set of computers on EC2 today, and not making use of other features like S3, ELB, etc, you're almost certainly overpaying by a significant amount compared to even high end dedicated server providers, let alone the cheap end of the market like OVH and Hetzner.
- kelnos 14y agoThe 'E' in EC2 is the major benefit you get using EC2 over a more traditional hosting provider. If you're just using static instances and don't use other AWS features, you're probably better off just not using EC2. In my opinion, it's priced with the elasticity in mind. (Yes, there's the option of reserved instances, but they still may or may not be the most cost-effective option for what you want to do in that case.)
- lmm 14y agoIt's always been true that running a static set of computers on EC2 means you're overpaying. It's not a case of not keeping up with the trend.
- sp332 14y agoReserved Amazon instances are not the cheapest but are competitive with some hosting providers. I've seen some comparisons where they're right in line with Rackspace's cloud offerings, with each winning on slightly different specs. And of course Amazon has different bandwidth pricing than almost anyone else (charging per-request as well as per-GB) so that might make the difference.
- cynicalkane 14y agoAlternately, AWS was underpriced to start with. There is nothing wrong with charging what people will pay, and a lot of very smart people find AWS to be a huge value-add...
- jonpaul 14y agoSo who are the competitors that one should look at? Sincere question. When comparing EC2 to Linode or to Rackspace Cloude, Amazon EC2 still wins. At least when I looked. I could be missing something.
- nivertech 14y agoDoes new instances work with regular paravirtual AMIs or do you need to build an HVM AMI like for cluster compute?
- debacle 14y agoHaving never used EC2, I wonder what an instance would cost me each month if I were to use it for something like hosting my website. I'm very happy where I am now, but I'm interested in learning more about Amazon's offerings and moving my blog over would probably be a good first step.
- bpatrianakos 14y agoI'm in your same position exactly but unfortunately the options aren't good for what you (and me) will use it for. Before this price drop a Micro instance would run you about $15 - $20 monthly. About the same as I pay for my 512 Linode. But I've heard horror stories about the CPU on the Micro not being able to handle any amount of moderate traffic for more than a few minutes at a time. So then there's the Small instances which are, at least for me, ideal anyway but when you do the math on a Small instance running 24/7 each month with just 10GB of EBS storage you get up past $60 a month. Okay, not bad - pretty close to VPS pricing, actually. But $60/month is a lot for me to spend on hosting a blog so its not for me. I don't know about you. Maybe your priorities and financial situation is different. I'm not hurting at all financially, I'm just cheap (which is why I'm not hurting financially).
- debacle 14y agoI will probably stick with my Linode then. Thanks for the info.
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- api 14y agoEC2 is still kind of expensive.
- kalininalex 14y agoCompared to what?
- trustfundbaby 14y ago... linode
- gibybo 14y agoI think that depends what you're comparing. For CPU bound applications, I think you're right, $/cpu is fairly expensive on EC2. However, memory tends to be cheaper on EC2 than most other VPS providers: EC2 Small Instance with 3 year reservation: 1.7GB RAM, $18/month Linode would be around $60/month for the same amount of RAM. Of course, the EC2 reservation requires that you use the same instance for 3 years and amortize the reservation upfront cost, but there are lot of reasonable applications that fit into this mold.