6 ms·

EC2's M3 Instances Go Global; Reduced EC2 Charges and Lower Bandwidth Prices

98 points by jeffbarr 14y ago

nubela 14y ago
There is a reason why Amazon is one of the most "overpriced" companies out there as according to the stock market. Every decision is made for the user. And I just LOVE Amazon!
hayksaakian 14y ago
Do these price drops ever trickle down to, say, users of heroku? I've not used heroku for very long, but this is the 2nd time since I started that AWS has dropped their prices, however I've heard nary a tale from heroku.
- jwilliams 14y ago
  Heroku is a big enough user to negotiate their own prices with Amazon, so I'd guess not.
  - Smerity 14y ago
    Just to expand on this, if you spend $2-5 million on reserved instances, you get a standard 20% discount[1]. If you spend more than $5 million, Amazon just say "Contact Us". Heroku certainly qualify for the "Contact Us" discount: at an average of $1,000 per reserved instance, they only need 5,000 servers, yet they're hosting well over 1 million sites. Heroku provide a service that significantly simplifies the deploy experience, though you pay a premium for that privilege. If you're willing to take the complexity hit of deploying to EC2 instead of using Heroku due to price, you're not really Heroku's target market. I'd expect a price decrease eventually, though likely in reaction to direct competitors rather than the drop in cost of the EC2 infrastructure itself. [1]: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/#reserved-volume-discounts http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/#reserved-volume-discounts
- benologist 14y ago
  Heroku only has 5 cents an hour to work with.... their back is kind of against the wall unless they use a whole other billing method. I would bet the dynos themselves have improved though.
ezequiel-garzon 14y ago
This is a pet peeve of mine, and I wonder how many HNers share this feeling. Why doesn't Amazon provide hard spending limits? Back in 2006 [1] this feature was supposed to be "in the works", but clearly it's not. Just as with the low security of many domain registrars, I guess there are not as many horror stories as my paranoid mind would lead me to believe. Any thoughts? PS: Yes, I understand the dangers of enabling these limits, which ideally should be accompanied by previous alerts, etc. [1] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=10532 https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=10532
- SwaroopH 14y ago
  Technically, using the billing alarm, you can use the APIs to shut down [respectively] all services.
- rkalla 14y ago
  This is one of those ideas that makes all the sense in the world in practice, and then someone turns on the limits and you hear about how "NewHotness.com" goes down on Black Friday because of the Hard Limits feature in a big news story and how AWS should never offer a feature like this because "you never know how much you might scale in a flood of users" and "that is the whole point of cloud computing!" Amazon is just saving themselves the heartache of all the irony :)
  - ezequiel-garzon 14y ago
    I imagine that must be their thinking. Clearly a lack of technical resources it's not. Moreover, Amazon has already shown [1] good will when negligence led to an unexpectedly high bill. I'm surprised (though empirically without much reason) not to hear stories from NewHotness et al about "how AWS burned five times our monthly budget in one day of frenzy". Even if those new visitors may very well be welcome for the business, I imagine there are many folks who would like some control (say, to double the limit), maybe at the risk of leaving the site offline for a few minutes. [1] http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2012/04/google-attack-how-i-self-attacked.html http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2012/04/google-attack-...
- 14y ago
ibig 14y ago
I do a lot of number crunching on the CPU. I dont need security or reliability. Is EC2 a good choice if you just want to do that? Or what would you guys use for that?
- plasma 14y ago
  In my experience CPU of cloud servers is generally... bad. If you do regular CPU work (24/7), you may be better off getting dedicated servers (with raw CPU grunt) for far cheaper cost per month.
  - ibig 14y ago
    dedicated hardware. common. that might have been an option in the 90s. i want to be able to use as many cpus as i want when i need them. not have a bunch of machines rotting away idle.
    - thejosh 14y ago
      so you ask for a question saying you do "a lot of number crunching", then complain at the fact that dedicated hardware will do what you need if you actually process a lot of data? ass.
    - lucian1900 14y ago
      The bigger instances (like high CPU) tend to be virtualized less aggressively, so they have good performance. It's really cheap to try and see if it's good enough for you.
    - jhartmann 14y ago
      I would actually recommend a hybrid approach. If you don't need too much memory there is a cpu heavy Amazon instance that you should scale up and down and have a VPN between a dedicated co-lo machine that handles the base load. If you need memory and cpu, its going to be costly to use EC2 unless you pay upfront for dedicated instances. In this case though the economics are probably not as favorable as getting some co-lo servers and letting them rot away. In short you will need to do a cost benefit analysis to see what makes sense. For our service we are going to use a co-lo server for our processing with an Elastic Beanstalk frontend and use a VPC + OpenVPN setup to bridge the two. We will incur some bandwidth charges because of this, but the cross talk between the boxes is actually minimal, since the client will post directly to the co-lo box(es) when it needs to upload, etc.
makeshifthoop 14y ago
I wonder how many people actually use the on-demand instances on a regular basis. For me, I purchase reserved instances in the marketplace and I never touch the on demand pricing. The past two price "reductions" have not affected me because the reserved pricing remains the same. For someone who does not want to sign 1/3 year lease, I find spot pricing to be more attractive than on demand. For the small chance that your instance will get terminated, you get to enjoy the same performance at 1/10 the on demand price. What if you need reliability / short term lease? I would use the amazon marketplace and find other people selling their reservation in the 1-11 month range (not guaranteed)
- skram 14y ago
  Agreed. I've moved my projects to reserved instances
benologist 14y ago
It would be really useful if you included the M1 and M3 on the pricing page. It's annoying the way information and pricing are kept so separate.
- michaelt 14y ago
  Like http://www.ec2instances.info/ http://www.ec2instances.info/ ?
ceejayoz 14y ago
The massive drop in inter-region pricing is going to be really nice for folks running apps with failover to other regions. We're working on cross-region replication for our new infrastructure, so this comes at a perfect time for us...
- jcastro 14y ago
  It's a nice incentive to get people to fail over across regions so when US East goes down again your application has less of a chance of embarrassing them. :)
- No1 14y ago
  This drop in inter-region data transfer prices is huge, and frankly, long overdue. Distributing across regions might actually be viable for companies that don't have money coming out of their ears.
tyw 14y ago
very excited for the lower S3 -> CloudFront prices. that change alone is going to save my site probably 25-35% on our CDN bandwidth charges.

98 points by jeffbarr 14y ago

There is a reason why Amazon is one of the most "overpriced" companies out there as according to the stock market. Every decision is made for the user. And I just LOVE Amazon!

hayksaakian 14y ago

Do these price drops ever trickle down to, say, users of heroku? I've not used heroku for very long, but this is the 2nd time since I started that AWS has dropped their prices, however I've heard nary a tale from heroku.

jwilliams 14y ago
Heroku is a big enough user to negotiate their own prices with Amazon, so I'd guess not.
- Smerity 14y ago
  Just to expand on this, if you spend $2-5 million on reserved instances, you get a standard 20% discount[1]. If you spend more than $5 million, Amazon just say "Contact Us". Heroku certainly qualify for the "Contact Us" discount: at an average of $1,000 per reserved instance, they only need 5,000 servers, yet they're hosting well over 1 million sites. Heroku provide a service that significantly simplifies the deploy experience, though you pay a premium for that privilege. If you're willing to take the complexity hit of deploying to EC2 instead of using Heroku due to price, you're not really Heroku's target market. I'd expect a price decrease eventually, though likely in reaction to direct competitors rather than the drop in cost of the EC2 infrastructure itself. [1]: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/#reserved-volume-discounts http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/#reserved-volume-discounts
benologist 14y ago
Heroku only has 5 cents an hour to work with.... their back is kind of against the wall unless they use a whole other billing method. I would bet the dynos themselves have improved though.

ezequiel-garzon 14y ago

This is a pet peeve of mine, and I wonder how many HNers share this feeling. Why doesn't Amazon provide hard spending limits? Back in 2006 [1] this feature was supposed to be "in the works", but clearly it's not. Just as with the low security of many domain registrars, I guess there are not as many horror stories as my paranoid mind would lead me to believe. Any thoughts? PS: Yes, I understand the dangers of enabling these limits, which ideally should be accompanied by previous alerts, etc. [1] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=10532 https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=10532

SwaroopH 14y ago
Technically, using the billing alarm, you can use the APIs to shut down [respectively] all services.
rkalla 14y ago
This is one of those ideas that makes all the sense in the world in practice, and then someone turns on the limits and you hear about how "NewHotness.com" goes down on Black Friday because of the Hard Limits feature in a big news story and how AWS should never offer a feature like this because "you never know how much you might scale in a flood of users" and "that is the whole point of cloud computing!" Amazon is just saving themselves the heartache of all the irony :)
- ezequiel-garzon 14y ago
  I imagine that must be their thinking. Clearly a lack of technical resources it's not. Moreover, Amazon has already shown [1] good will when negligence led to an unexpectedly high bill. I'm surprised (though empirically without much reason) not to hear stories from NewHotness et al about "how AWS burned five times our monthly budget in one day of frenzy". Even if those new visitors may very well be welcome for the business, I imagine there are many folks who would like some control (say, to double the limit), maybe at the risk of leaving the site offline for a few minutes. [1] http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2012/04/google-attack-how-i-self-attacked.html http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2012/04/google-attack-...
14y ago

ibig 14y ago

I do a lot of number crunching on the CPU. I dont need security or reliability. Is EC2 a good choice if you just want to do that? Or what would you guys use for that?

plasma 14y ago
In my experience CPU of cloud servers is generally... bad. If you do regular CPU work (24/7), you may be better off getting dedicated servers (with raw CPU grunt) for far cheaper cost per month.
- ibig 14y ago
  dedicated hardware. common. that might have been an option in the 90s. i want to be able to use as many cpus as i want when i need them. not have a bunch of machines rotting away idle.
  - thejosh 14y ago
    so you ask for a question saying you do "a lot of number crunching", then complain at the fact that dedicated hardware will do what you need if you actually process a lot of data? ass.
  - lucian1900 14y ago
    The bigger instances (like high CPU) tend to be virtualized less aggressively, so they have good performance. It's really cheap to try and see if it's good enough for you.
  - jhartmann 14y ago
    I would actually recommend a hybrid approach. If you don't need too much memory there is a cpu heavy Amazon instance that you should scale up and down and have a VPN between a dedicated co-lo machine that handles the base load. If you need memory and cpu, its going to be costly to use EC2 unless you pay upfront for dedicated instances. In this case though the economics are probably not as favorable as getting some co-lo servers and letting them rot away. In short you will need to do a cost benefit analysis to see what makes sense. For our service we are going to use a co-lo server for our processing with an Elastic Beanstalk frontend and use a VPC + OpenVPN setup to bridge the two. We will incur some bandwidth charges because of this, but the cross talk between the boxes is actually minimal, since the client will post directly to the co-lo box(es) when it needs to upload, etc.

makeshifthoop 14y ago

I wonder how many people actually use the on-demand instances on a regular basis. For me, I purchase reserved instances in the marketplace and I never touch the on demand pricing. The past two price "reductions" have not affected me because the reserved pricing remains the same. For someone who does not want to sign 1/3 year lease, I find spot pricing to be more attractive than on demand. For the small chance that your instance will get terminated, you get to enjoy the same performance at 1/10 the on demand price. What if you need reliability / short term lease? I would use the amazon marketplace and find other people selling their reservation in the 1-11 month range (not guaranteed)

skram 14y ago
Agreed. I've moved my projects to reserved instances

benologist 14y ago

It would be really useful if you included the M1 and M3 on the pricing page. It's annoying the way information and pricing are kept so separate.

michaelt 14y ago
Like http://www.ec2instances.info/ http://www.ec2instances.info/ ?

ceejayoz 14y ago

The massive drop in inter-region pricing is going to be really nice for folks running apps with failover to other regions. We're working on cross-region replication for our new infrastructure, so this comes at a perfect time for us...

jcastro 14y ago
It's a nice incentive to get people to fail over across regions so when US East goes down again your application has less of a chance of embarrassing them. :)
No1 14y ago
This drop in inter-region data transfer prices is huge, and frankly, long overdue. Distributing across regions might actually be viable for companies that don't have money coming out of their ears.

tyw 14y ago

very excited for the lower S3 -> CloudFront prices. that change alone is going to save my site probably 25-35% on our CDN bandwidth charges.