8 ms·

New EC2 M3 Instance Sizes and Lower Prices for S3 and EBS

103 points by pentium10 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
JoshGlazebrook 13y ago
Are outgoing bandwidth costs ever going to drop? It just seems crazy that DigitalOcean can provide you 1TB of bandwidth in their $5 plan while 1TB on AWS ($0.12/GB) is $122.76 (first GB is free).
- paukiatwee 13y ago
  Not everyone will use ALL 1TB. So DO will able to save some bandwidth.
  - ddorian43 13y ago
    But will you use 1TB on the 16GB ram plan? If yes then you just saved 40% of the bill. They will also make it later so all your nodes'bandwidth is cumulative.(like linode has)
    - Kudos 13y ago
      > They will also make it later so all your nodes'bandwidth is cumulative.(like linode has) Source? I've been told that that isn't the case by their support.
    - ddorian43 13y ago
      https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/bandwidth-pooling https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/bandwidth-p... https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/bandwidth-pooling--2 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/bandwidth-p... Some say yes, some say no.
- matthewmacleod 13y ago
  I'm almost certain that while DO currently offer 1TB for $5, they actually can't offer that in the long term. Or rather, they are relying on less usage than this, and if all of their customers were actually utilising it, they'd have to jack up prices.
  - bluedino 13y ago
    Dreamhost had a blog article about overselling or oversubscribing - it's very common from ISP's to gyms. http://www.dreamhost.com/dreamscape/2006/05/18/the-truth-about-overselling/ http://www.dreamhost.com/dreamscape/2006/05/18/the-truth-abo...
- ghshephard 13y ago
  Transit costs an ISP (who buys 40+ gigabit circuits) about $1/megabit @ 95th percentile. 1 Terabyte is about 3 megabits/second fully loaded for a month - So, presuming that DO has to pay for their pipe, that 1 TB costs them $3. Amazon is probably charging a bit much, but DO's costs are probably unsustainable if people actually used their 1TB (much like any service that offers people a "huge amount" with the hope that nobody actually uses it.
  - Retric 13y ago
    Or they plan on overages. They charge '$0.02 per GB thereafter' which works out to 20$ per TB so they break-even on bandwidth at ~1.2TB. Sure, some people can get vary close to 1TB without going over but for most people it's hard to manage bandwidth that exactly.
  - bluedino 13y ago
    Exactly how Dreamhost/Hostgator can offer 'unlimited diskspace/bandwidth/puppies' for $6 a month or whatever.
    - pgrote 13y ago
      Two ways: 1) They oversell their capacity. 2) Their terms of service agreement prohibit anything that would actually let you us unlimited. http://webmasterfaqs.org/is-unlimited-web-hosting-a-scam/ http://webmasterfaqs.org/is-unlimited-web-hosting-a-scam/
      - smackfu 13y ago
        Yeah. Dreamhost kindly asked me to switch to their VPS service a few years ago when I was using too much CPU.
  - marquis 13y ago
    I have about 15 droplets on DO right now and none of them are close to using a TB even over a year (but we don't use them for production). I'd bet they are banking on this for most cases. I checked out Verizon's new cloud beta yesterday, and while they haven't announced pricing maybe they can do a good deal on bandwidth given that they own so much of the network.
aioprisan 13y ago
m3.medium only has 4GB of storage? Is that a typo? Why not the standard 8GB? That'll make it unusable for my AMIs. The m3.medium is $0.113/hr for 3 ECU and 3.75 GB RAM, while the m3.large is $0.225/hr for 6.5 ECUs and 7.5 GB RAM but 32 GB of SSD storage.
- jeffbarr 13y ago
  That's the correct number. The complete list of instance types and sizes lives as http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
  - helper 13y ago
    Is that the size of the root volume?
    - helper 13y ago
      After spinning up an instance-store m3.medium, the 4GB volume is in addition to the root volume.
    - jmelloy 13y ago
      They have a concept of an "ephemeral" volume, which is a disk mounted on the same rack. It goes away every time you reboot, but is useful for caching or file transfers, because it's the fastest disk you have access to. In day to day usage it's not actually that important. You can have as much EBS/SAN data as you're willing to pay for, so everything important gets stored on that.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    Jeff, When are the m3.medium and m3.large instances going to be available for use in Elastic Beanstalk in USEAST1?
- ak217 13y ago
  As with all instance types, what you see in the Instance Storage column is the ephemeral storage available to you as /dev/xvdb, etc. The root volume remains the same at 7 GB, and for this instance type it must be EBS-backed.
netcraft 13y ago
so this brings them in line or lower than google's cloud storage https://cloud.google.com/products/cloud-storage/ https://cloud.google.com/products/cloud-storage/ Great to see this competition. Does anyone know if s3 and gcs are comparable to azure's locally redundant or geographically redundant storage? The new pricing is basically in the middle of the two for azure.
- mjn 13y ago
  S3 is locally redundant; buckets live in a specific region you put them in. You could roll your own geographically redundant storage by mirroring the same data into buckets in two or more regions, though. With the new pricing, two-region mirroring would run you between $0.136/GB/mo and $0.17/GB/mo, depending on whether you also wanted local redundancy within each region or were using "reduced redundancy storage" for each copy. Joyent's pricing is slightly better if you want to roll your own multi-region storage: http://www.joyent.com/products/manta/pricing http://www.joyent.com/products/manta/pricing (Also comes with an interesting Unix-compute service where you can submit jobs to run over the data where it lives, rather than having to download it into a VPS to process, which I find more interesting than the storage itself.)
  - hemancuso 13y ago
    US Standard S3 region is geographically redundant. It routes to both Northern Virginia and "facilities in the Pacific Northwest." This redundancy is why it does not provide read-after-write consistency like the other regions.
    - mjn 13y ago
      Ah interesting, thanks! I didn't see that meta-region mentioned on the Pricing page (http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/). Is it priced the same as the two lower-cost U.S. regions (N. Virginia / Oregon) that it apparently overlays?
      - mnordhoff 13y ago
manishsharan 13y ago
One of the things I hate most about AWS is their refusal to give monthly pricing for EC2 instances like Digital Ocean. Instead I have to use a web form to estimate my monthly/quarterly costs. One of the reasons I might move to DO is that I can do back of the envelope calculations so easily when projecting my costs. And bandwidth costs.
- ShaneOG 13y ago
  Check out http://ec2instances.info http://ec2instances.info It will be even better when this PR is merged (soon) https://github.com/powdahound/ec2instances.info/pull/37 https://github.com/powdahound/ec2instances.info/pull/37
  - _delirium 13y ago
    It's be cool if the 'annually' version could also take into account reserved pricing, since doing the 1-year reserved thing would be the sensible option if you wanted to use a machine as an always-on VPS-style box. E.g. the m1.small instance is $797.16 annually (what the page currently reports), but with 1-year "heavy utilization" reservation it ends up being a more reasonable $291.64 (including both the cost of reservation and the instance cost).
    - singlow 13y ago
      The calculator provided by Amazon does have the option of factoring in the Reserve Pricing and will give you the monthly and annual charges as separate line items. http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
    - snewman 13y ago
      We posted a calculator that does exactly this: https://scalyr.com/cloud https://scalyr.com/cloud. It will let you compute a "normalized" monthly cost for the various reserved and non-reserved options, customized for your usage and cost of capital, so that you can make an apples-to-apples comparison. You can also compare with other providers. Always happy to get feedback on this tool.
velodrome 13y ago
I would love to have SSD-based EBS?
- acdha 13y ago
  How would that be different from provisioned IOPS – simply having a limit greater than 4K IOPs?
  - velodrome 13y ago
    I guess it is kind of the same but a higher upper limit? Rackspace Block Storage vs EBS (provisioned) - Page 73: http://c1776742.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/downloads/pdfs/CloudBlockStorage_Benchmark.pdf http://c1776742.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/downloads/...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- mjb 13y ago
  Provisioned IOPS EBS volumes are SSD based. From the product page (http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/details/ http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/details/): ""Backed by Solid-State Drives (SSDs), Provisioned IOPS volumes support up to 30 IOPS per GB which enables you to provision 4000 IOPS on a volume as small as 134 GB.""
will_lam 13y ago
Cool - signed up for AWS S3 last night and woke up to this news :)
DrJ 13y ago
remember this all starts February 1st :D.
manas2004 13y ago
There is no small instance type in any current generation instance types anymore.

103 points by pentium10 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

Are outgoing bandwidth costs ever going to drop? It just seems crazy that DigitalOcean can provide you 1TB of bandwidth in their $5 plan while 1TB on AWS ($0.12/GB) is $122.76 (first GB is free).

paukiatwee 13y ago
Not everyone will use ALL 1TB. So DO will able to save some bandwidth.
- ddorian43 13y ago
  But will you use 1TB on the 16GB ram plan? If yes then you just saved 40% of the bill. They will also make it later so all your nodes'bandwidth is cumulative.(like linode has)
  - Kudos 13y ago
    > They will also make it later so all your nodes'bandwidth is cumulative.(like linode has) Source? I've been told that that isn't the case by their support.
  - ddorian43 13y ago
    https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/bandwidth-pooling https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/bandwidth-p... https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/bandwidth-pooling--2 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/bandwidth-p... Some say yes, some say no.
matthewmacleod 13y ago
I'm almost certain that while DO currently offer 1TB for $5, they actually can't offer that in the long term. Or rather, they are relying on less usage than this, and if all of their customers were actually utilising it, they'd have to jack up prices.
- bluedino 13y ago
  Dreamhost had a blog article about overselling or oversubscribing - it's very common from ISP's to gyms. http://www.dreamhost.com/dreamscape/2006/05/18/the-truth-about-overselling/ http://www.dreamhost.com/dreamscape/2006/05/18/the-truth-abo...
ghshephard 13y ago
Transit costs an ISP (who buys 40+ gigabit circuits) about $1/megabit @ 95th percentile. 1 Terabyte is about 3 megabits/second fully loaded for a month - So, presuming that DO has to pay for their pipe, that 1 TB costs them $3. Amazon is probably charging a bit much, but DO's costs are probably unsustainable if people actually used their 1TB (much like any service that offers people a "huge amount" with the hope that nobody actually uses it.
- Retric 13y ago
  Or they plan on overages. They charge '$0.02 per GB thereafter' which works out to 20$ per TB so they break-even on bandwidth at ~1.2TB. Sure, some people can get vary close to 1TB without going over but for most people it's hard to manage bandwidth that exactly.
- bluedino 13y ago
  Exactly how Dreamhost/Hostgator can offer 'unlimited diskspace/bandwidth/puppies' for $6 a month or whatever.
  - pgrote 13y ago
    Two ways: 1) They oversell their capacity. 2) Their terms of service agreement prohibit anything that would actually let you us unlimited. http://webmasterfaqs.org/is-unlimited-web-hosting-a-scam/ http://webmasterfaqs.org/is-unlimited-web-hosting-a-scam/
    - smackfu 13y ago
      Yeah. Dreamhost kindly asked me to switch to their VPS service a few years ago when I was using too much CPU.
- marquis 13y ago
  I have about 15 droplets on DO right now and none of them are close to using a TB even over a year (but we don't use them for production). I'd bet they are banking on this for most cases. I checked out Verizon's new cloud beta yesterday, and while they haven't announced pricing maybe they can do a good deal on bandwidth given that they own so much of the network.

aioprisan 13y ago

m3.medium only has 4GB of storage? Is that a typo? Why not the standard 8GB? That'll make it unusable for my AMIs. The m3.medium is $0.113/hr for 3 ECU and 3.75 GB RAM, while the m3.large is $0.225/hr for 6.5 ECUs and 7.5 GB RAM but 32 GB of SSD storage.

jeffbarr 13y ago
That's the correct number. The complete list of instance types and sizes lives as http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
- helper 13y ago
  Is that the size of the root volume?
  - helper 13y ago
    After spinning up an instance-store m3.medium, the 4GB volume is in addition to the root volume.
  - jmelloy 13y ago
    They have a concept of an "ephemeral" volume, which is a disk mounted on the same rack. It goes away every time you reboot, but is useful for caching or file transfers, because it's the fastest disk you have access to. In day to day usage it's not actually that important. You can have as much EBS/SAN data as you're willing to pay for, so everything important gets stored on that.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  Jeff, When are the m3.medium and m3.large instances going to be available for use in Elastic Beanstalk in USEAST1?
ak217 13y ago
As with all instance types, what you see in the Instance Storage column is the ephemeral storage available to you as /dev/xvdb, etc. The root volume remains the same at 7 GB, and for this instance type it must be EBS-backed.

netcraft 13y ago

so this brings them in line or lower than google's cloud storage https://cloud.google.com/products/cloud-storage/ https://cloud.google.com/products/cloud-storage/ Great to see this competition. Does anyone know if s3 and gcs are comparable to azure's locally redundant or geographically redundant storage? The new pricing is basically in the middle of the two for azure.

mjn 13y ago
S3 is locally redundant; buckets live in a specific region you put them in. You could roll your own geographically redundant storage by mirroring the same data into buckets in two or more regions, though. With the new pricing, two-region mirroring would run you between $0.136/GB/mo and $0.17/GB/mo, depending on whether you also wanted local redundancy within each region or were using "reduced redundancy storage" for each copy. Joyent's pricing is slightly better if you want to roll your own multi-region storage: http://www.joyent.com/products/manta/pricing http://www.joyent.com/products/manta/pricing (Also comes with an interesting Unix-compute service where you can submit jobs to run over the data where it lives, rather than having to download it into a VPS to process, which I find more interesting than the storage itself.)
- hemancuso 13y ago
  US Standard S3 region is geographically redundant. It routes to both Northern Virginia and "facilities in the Pacific Northwest." This redundancy is why it does not provide read-after-write consistency like the other regions.
  - mjn 13y ago
    Ah interesting, thanks! I didn't see that meta-region mentioned on the Pricing page (http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/). Is it priced the same as the two lower-cost U.S. regions (N. Virginia / Oregon) that it apparently overlays?
    - mnordhoff 13y ago

manishsharan 13y ago

One of the things I hate most about AWS is their refusal to give monthly pricing for EC2 instances like Digital Ocean. Instead I have to use a web form to estimate my monthly/quarterly costs. One of the reasons I might move to DO is that I can do back of the envelope calculations so easily when projecting my costs. And bandwidth costs.

ShaneOG 13y ago
Check out http://ec2instances.info http://ec2instances.info It will be even better when this PR is merged (soon) https://github.com/powdahound/ec2instances.info/pull/37 https://github.com/powdahound/ec2instances.info/pull/37
- _delirium 13y ago
  It's be cool if the 'annually' version could also take into account reserved pricing, since doing the 1-year reserved thing would be the sensible option if you wanted to use a machine as an always-on VPS-style box. E.g. the m1.small instance is $797.16 annually (what the page currently reports), but with 1-year "heavy utilization" reservation it ends up being a more reasonable $291.64 (including both the cost of reservation and the instance cost).
  - singlow 13y ago
    The calculator provided by Amazon does have the option of factoring in the Reserve Pricing and will give you the monthly and annual charges as separate line items. http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
  - snewman 13y ago
    We posted a calculator that does exactly this: https://scalyr.com/cloud https://scalyr.com/cloud. It will let you compute a "normalized" monthly cost for the various reserved and non-reserved options, customized for your usage and cost of capital, so that you can make an apples-to-apples comparison. You can also compare with other providers. Always happy to get feedback on this tool.

velodrome 13y ago

I would love to have SSD-based EBS?

acdha 13y ago
How would that be different from provisioned IOPS – simply having a limit greater than 4K IOPs?
- velodrome 13y ago
  I guess it is kind of the same but a higher upper limit? Rackspace Block Storage vs EBS (provisioned) - Page 73: http://c1776742.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/downloads/pdfs/CloudBlockStorage_Benchmark.pdf http://c1776742.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/downloads/...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mjb 13y ago
Provisioned IOPS EBS volumes are SSD based. From the product page (http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/details/ http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/details/): ""Backed by Solid-State Drives (SSDs), Provisioned IOPS volumes support up to 30 IOPS per GB which enables you to provision 4000 IOPS on a volume as small as 134 GB.""

will_lam 13y ago

Cool - signed up for AWS S3 last night and woke up to this news :)

DrJ 13y ago

remember this all starts February 1st :D.

manas2004 13y ago

There is no small instance type in any current generation instance types anymore.