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Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- spoiledtechie 13y agoBe more constructive and maybe I won't vote you down next time.
- JNox64 13y agoMy apologies, didn't know humor was considered destructive on HN. =| There goes my excitement for the price drop. =( edit: do I get my one point back if I delete it or am I permanently shamed?
- superflit 13y agoDon't be a karma whore
- notwedtm 13y agoDon't be such an asshole and maybe I won't vote you down next time.
- rmcpherson 13y agoWill there be any change to minimum spot instance pricing? As far as I know this minimum is set by Amazon, but I don't see that pricing listed in the announcement here.
- applecore 13y agoThis is huge. Startups everywhere are huge beneficiaries of this price war between Amazon and Google over the future of cloud computing.
- bane 13y agoLet's just hope they all stay in business so we don't end up with only one player in the market...who can then jack up prices at will.
- rodgerd 13y agoWelcome to Amazon's long-term business model.
- joshjdr 13y agoIn some respects it's Google's model too. They gave away Google Apps free to small businesses for years as they pursued Microsoft's Exchange Server market. At first Google Apps was free for up to 100 users, then 50, then 10. Now they charge $5 per user per month for new plans. Legacy pricing is grandfathered so they didn't really piss anybody off in the process, but it seems pretty clear the strategy was to subsidize the product and accumulate market share.
- Already__Taken 13y agoDon't you think the start up costs for competitors are always going to be low enough to stop the incumbents going mad with it?
- w1ntermute 13y agoWhen it comes to companies like Google and Amazon, I don't think that's a worry.
- bane 13y agoI'd actually be worried with Google. They've demonstrated a willingness to shut down revenue sinks even if it costs them good will. If these companies find themselves in a position that they're subsidizing their cloud computing offerings with profits made elsewhere, it might make more sense just to pull the plug.
- 13y ago
- j-rom 13y agoJust out of curiosity, why would one choose AWS over Digital Ocean? Isn't DO considerably cheaper?
- toomuchtodo 13y agoService ecosystem (S3, RDS, SQS, VPCs, Cloudsearch, Elastic Transcoder, to name a few), long-term stability, reliability, support, the ability to peer directly with AWS to name a few.
- seldo 13y agoDO's "internal" networking/security group support is still immature. I use DO for personal stuff, but at work we use AWS. Just never EBS. Ever.
- grosbisou 13y agoWhat's wrong with EBS? And for what usage?
- seldo 13y agohttp://blog.awe.sm/2012/12/18/aws-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/#~ozDTEFkXkMAR1E http://blog.awe.sm/2012/12/18/aws-the-good-the-bad-and-the-u... TLDR: it's okay for backups, but in critical path it's a world of sadness. Failure modes are too painful.
- rpedela 13y agoMost of AWS's major outages have been related to EBS. Although outages can happen to any hosting provider, and I am sure they have fixed the previous issues. So EBS should get more stable over time and it is already quite stable. The performance of EBS is pretty bad, and getting decent performance is expensive. Having said that, if your application runs in memory and disk usage is infrequent then it is probably fine to use EBS. EBS is also much more expensive than the instance storage, but it is also durable unlike instance storage. On the whole, "never ever EBS" is too strong language making it incorrect. As usual, it depends.
- logn 13y agoWow the c3.8x large drops by almost a dollar/hr. Cheers to Google.
- shebson 13y agoI would be so happy if Heroku passed along these price cuts to their customers, but based on past AWS price cuts, I'm not holding my breath.
- daviding 13y agoThey might (a little) in that this 'friction' is exactly the sort of plain bottom-line info to get people to make the step to move off of heroku and on to raw EC2 (or other more infrastructure based setups).
- phillmv 13y agoHeroku's kind of in a sweet spot. They already charge an immense premium over your own fleet of micro to large instances, but by the time you rack up enough dynos for it to make sense to spend the necessary weeks migrating your infrastructure there's a good chance that replicating the environment with your own in house version (30+ instances?) is non trivial enough to be scary. Once you're over a handful of dynos, the sunk costs and uncertainty will keep you there until it becomes totally ludicrous.
- ROFISH 13y agoHeroku hasn't changed pricing since they launched, actually. The only historical price reference I quickly found was that the EC2 was $0.085/hr for (what is now called) an m1.small[1]. Heroku launched with $0.05/hr pricing. Amazon's new m1.small pricing is $0.044/hr, nearly a 50% price drop over four years. Heroku still is $0.05/hr, the same price as when it launched. Heroku runs on EC2. [1] http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com/2010/09/15/how-run-drupal-amazon-ec2-using-new-micro-instance http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com/2010/09/15/how-run-drupal-...
- ufmace 13y agoUh, did I miss something here? Sounds like Heroku was actually cheaper than the raw EC2 rate when it launched, and is now just over half a cent per hour more.
- NathanKP 13y agoI see that the prices on the M3 instances dropped a bit more than the prices on the M1 instances did, so they are encouraging us customers even more to move from the older HHD based instances to the newer, faster SSD based instances.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoThey want to retire the m1 hardware. Probably costs more per hour for power to run than the new m3 hardware.
- mpg33 13y agoM1 is older hard drives and M3 is SSD? Didn't know that
- clogston 13y agoYeah, but keep in mind it's only applicable if you use instance-based storage (which you declare when you spin up the instance). If you use an EBS mount it's a moot point.
- troels 13y agoThe m3 instances were already cheaper than the m1 before (as well as faster). I assume they want to get rid of the old hardware.
- cauliturtle 13y agoec2 pricing is just a small piece of the whole bill. but it is great to see the price drops, thanks google! wonder if there would be price battle on bandwidth.
- carlosdp 13y agoThat only took one day! This competition looks good for the future.
- grinich 13y agoI love market competition. :)
- powera 13y agoThe most striking thing to me is that they seem to be aggressively motivating people to longer reservations. For RDS they only dropped prices for on-demand (which is still expensive) and 3 year, heavy utilization instances.
- troels 13y agoWhere do you see the new pricing for RDS?
- gtaylor 13y agoJust to make sure I'm reading this right, the upfront reservation fees are higher, but the reserved hourly rates dropped a good bit. It's cheaper over the duration of the reservation, but you owe more of the term upfront. Given this tidbit, might you reserve an instance now, pay the lower fee, but still take advantage of the new hourly rates on April 1? Or are you locked in at whatever rate your reservation is for?
- nirvdrum 13y agoYou're locked into whatever rate your reservation is for. This is why you see rate fluctuations on the marketplace for the same instance type. It's also why a 3 year reservation may not make sense.
- gtaylor 13y agoThat makes sense, thanks for the clarification. Bummer, though. We just reserved a multi-AZ m3.large RDS instance last week. I wish AWS would take up Google's system of graduated price reductions over steady run duration.
- nirvdrum 13y agoThe other fun tidbit is on heavy reservations you pay per-hour even if you're not using the machine. That's not the case for the light or medium. So keep that in mind when planning out your reservations. When we switched off EC2 it was financially advantageous to basically give away our heavy instances on the marketplace just to shed the liability.
- gtaylor 13y agoAfter this latest round of price cuts, I'm starting to question whether I even want to reserve instances on the lower end. An m3.medium is about $52/month on demand vs $35/month (amortized over 12 months with a 1-year heavy usage reservation). In this example, it becomes a question of whether it's worth saving $130'ish a year for the liability that a 1-year m3.medium heavy util reservation represents. At the lower end, that's not a huge amount of liability, but it may be a case where I just don't bother reserving m3.mediums anymore because it's a wash.
- diafygi 13y agoHmm, the micro instances don't seem to have changed ($0.020/hr).
- wise_young_man 13y agoI was just thinking that, the micro EC2 is now becoming more and more devalued as the higher ones get closer to it's price per performance. I was hoping for us to be able to spin up Beanstalk apps a little cheaper though and it is the cheapest server option and $50/app vs Heroku is a bit expensive since it requires the ELB. I wouldn't mind it all if they had a way to deploy multiple apps using the EC2 servers and ELB you setup though.
- chris_mahan 13y agoRemember, you get what (the reliability, service) you pay for. And what happens when AWS is no longer a revenue source? Shareholder (owner)'s decision: cut it.
- dataminded 13y agoIn my experience, unless you are paying for EC2 service in the form of a support plan then there is no service to speak of. Not a big deal if you are running a business but pretty significant ($588/year) if you are doing personal dev work.
- darkarmani 13y ago> Remember, you get what (the reliability, service) you pay for. So, pay extra for the support contract?
- gtaylor 13y agoLet us hope that RDS prices also drop as a result of this. It's enough of a value for us at the current price rates to be happy with it, but there will need to be some decrease to make sure that it makes financial sense over straight self-managed EC2.
- chourobin 13y agoDoes anyone know if these pricing changes are retroactive for customers that have already purchased the reserved instances?
- noir_lord 13y agoNot usually. It's pretty much Caveat emptor with them.
- manishsharan 13y agoDear AWS, could we also get a price drop on Cloudfront bandwidth ?
- ausjke 13y agoDO still seems way cheaper for my usage though, but it's good to see Amazon dropped prices.
- eliben 13y agoCompetition is amazing. Cheers to free markets :)
- rcthompson 13y agoAny time something is announced for April 1, I always have to take a minute to figure out if it's a joke or not. If I wanted to make a change for my company beginning in April, I think I would announce the planned date as April 2nd just to avoid any confusion.
- lsaferite 13y agoYeah, I have the exact same thing. I actually hate April 1st for this exact reason. I try to stay off all forums even, just to avoid confusion.
- redthrowaway 13y agoThis is crazy. The savings we'll see from this alone are enough for another full-time dev or two.
- welder 13y agoHow many instances do you run? At $17.52 saved per year for m1.small that means you must be running over 10k instances to save enough for another full-time dev or two... if your devs are located in SF area.
- ryderm 13y agoI think you mean per month?
- redthrowaway 13y agoWe're currently spending about $20k/month on EC2 and are about to migrate a bunch of our colos over. Between what we are spending and what we're budgeting to spend with our new architecture, we're looking at a couple devs/year savings (Victoria, BC)
- omarforgotpwd 13y ago"Effective April 1 2014, Google should go fuck itself" -- Bezos
- ing33k 13y agohow are they still making profits ?
- iLoch 13y agoHardware cost has come down significantly since the prices were last changed. They are making a lot more money now than they will be on April 1st, but it looks like they'll still be in the black.
- travem 13y agoAmazon markets the story that they operate on thin margins (which no doubt they do in retail) but in AWS the margins are probably fairly attractive. They don't break this out in their SEC filings because (a) they don't have to, and (b) doing so would undermine their marketing message. Economically cloud can make a lot of sense for several potential customers, including: * those who have highly variable workloads (so they can spin up lots of servers to meet demand then spin them down afterwards) * those who favor OpEx over CapEx (Like startups) * and for those who are bypassing internal IT for TTM reasons (e.g. "shadow IT") Another point to consider is that while AWS is increasingly dropping prices the same is in effect happening for people procuring their own hardware. The performance over price ratio (on multiple axis) is also improving for on premises deployments (c.f. Moore's Law).
- PhantomGremlin 13y agoThey're not making profits. Most quarters they are only slightly profitable. Current P/E is 582, which is astronomically high. E.g. for comparison Apple's P/E is 13. But that's been Amazon's strategy for almost two decades. Their goal is to instead grow their business. Currently they are at $74 Billion / year in revenue, and still increasing. Once they stop their massive spending on growth, they will (presumably) be able to increase their profits.
- fragsworth 13y agoI just reserved a series of heavy-utilization m3.xlarge instances for roughly $30k. Apparently, if I had waited a month, I could have saved about $13k because of these price reductions. I can't help but feel that I got really fucked by poor timing that I couldn't control. It would hurt so much less if these price changes were more gradual and somewhat consistent (perhaps monthly).
- anderiv 13y agoIt's worth calling and talking to your sales rep about this. I've found AWS to be surprisingly accommodating with pricing.
- iancarroll 13y agoI accidentally ran a spot instance for $70 an hour for two hours due to my less-then-smart configuration. They refunded me. :)
- Deinos 13y agoThat says a lot for their customer service. I know a lot of companies that would have had more of a "you break it, you buy it" style attitude. Good on them!
- tomphoolery 13y agoMe too, I accidentally ran some windows instances for like a month!
- semerda 13y agoDitto. At the AWS keynote today Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President, spoke of cost saving initiatives AWS has going with $200m already saved via automated notifications to customers to power down their inactive EC2 instances. Andy emphasized the importance of great customer service by AWS & helping customers cut costs. Use that as your leverage point in the discussions with your sales rep. Hope it works out for you!
- peteretep 13y ago
- megaframe 13y agoLast time I priced this out for a personal project it was half the price just to build something at home... if I didn't already own the setup this would be pretty great.
- mentaat 13y agohurray for competition! <3 amazon and google.
- warbaker 13y agoThank you, Google.
- SeoxyS 13y agoWhoops, sounds like bitter (but still good) news for companies like ours that have million-dollar contracts of reserved instances. If we were to grab our reserved instances right now instead of a few months ago, we'd have saved more than half a million over the next year. Bleh.
- wmf 13y agoThere are a bunch of calculators to compare reserved vs. on demand pricing, but it just occurred to me that they should really be comparing reserved vs. predicted on demand pricing, taking into account inevitable future price drops. Instead of locking in savings, reserved instances are really locking in today's high prices.
- georgebarnett 13y agoThe trouble I'm in is that I have to buy RIs for a particular workload to ensure that the instances are there when I need them (and so I don't get "Sorry, we're full" error).
- ikarandeep 13y agoI'm hoping the storage price drops will in return let Dropbox lower its prices to compete with Google Drive.
- millioncents 13y agoI'm very impressed with Amazon's scale and their ability to produce such low prices. Whilst many SaaS vendors (and even traditional brick and mortar business) seemingly keep on increasing prices because of "inflationary" pressures and whatnot... Amazon just keeps on showing - the consumers are being taken for a ride by the rest of the businesses out there.
- kaliblack 13y agoThere's no relationship between Amazon's AWS pricing and pricing for goods and services in other markets.
- yixizhang 13y agoMy reaction is Heroku should drop their price too.
- twistedpair 13y agoThere went most of the rabbits out of Bezo's hat for re:Invent 2015.
- dalek2point3 13y agoAnyone have a sense of how long this price war could feasibly go on? What's happening at the cost side for GOOG / AMZN? How much do you reckon its costs the on the margin for extra cores, memory etc?
- lamby 13y agoSomething we should always remember when considering the implications and hermeneutics of AWS pricing (from Brad Stone's book): Bill Miller, the chief investment officer at Legg Mason Capital Management and a major Amazon shareholder, asked Bezos at the time about the profitability prospects for AWS. Bezos predicted they would be good over the long term but said that he didn’t want to repeat “Steve Jobs’s mistake” of pricing the iPhone in a way that was so fantastically profitable that the smartphone market became a magnet for competition.
- CoconutPilot 13y agoWe are in the middle of deracking and throwing out (no kidding) some 3+ year old machines at my work. Care to take a guess at what a 3+ year old machine's specs are? Cause I know you don't have a chance at getting it right. Dell C1100 1U (almost 4 years old) 2x 6core with HT, 24 active threads 144 GB RAM 10x 300 15k SAS I think there are very few use cases where Amazon makes sense. Their VMs are very expensive, and under powered for what you pay.
- e_proxus 13y agoWell, I always see it this way: With Amazon you never pay for the actual hardware, because that would be a rip-off. You pay for the service of not having to "throw out old machines", you pay for being able to start a machine with one click, you pay for the services around (S3, Dynamo, ELB, Route 53 etc.) and ultimately, you pay for not having to care about 80% of infrastructure problems.
- ghshephard 13y agoAnd yet, very rational people, with full understanding of the costs of both environments, and pretty detailed spreadsheets (I've spoken with them) continue to buy into PaaS/IaaS offerings aggressively. For the most part, it's because the cost of hardware isn't the only factor, but the flexibility, ability to rapidly scale (and descale), and, most importantly, the fact that Amazon takes care of all the dirty network engineering/system administration work required to keep the plumbing working. But, hey, that's the great thing about the free market - every company/individual gets to make the choices that are most advantageous for themselves. I wouldn't be surprised that in regions where network engineers/sysadmins make less than $125-$150K/year, and there isn't a need to turn up a dozen servers overnight, (and, turn them off the night after that) - that AWS/Azure/GCS isn't attractive. But, clearly, for others, it is.
- dagw 13y agoGPU instances for $0.65 an hour. Wow!
- nivertech 13y agoIt's the old price - no discount for g2 instances ;(
- dagw 13y agoIt's been a while since I looked, but I recall GPU prices being around $2 and hour (and thus writing them off).
- nivertech 13y ago$2 per hour are cluster compute instances with 2 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs (“Fermi” GF100) GPUs. g2 instances are smaller with NVIDIA GRID GPUs (“Kepler” GK104). - G2 popular use cases: Game streaming, 3D application streaming, and other server-side graphics workloads. - CG1 popular use cases: Computational chemistry, rendering, financial modeling, and engineering design.
- WoodenChair 13y agoIt's interesting how all of the focus of this discussion is Google, Amazon, and Heroku. Why hasn't RedHat's OpenShift gained more mindshare? It's not a bad platform, although I've found their support leaves something to be desired. It's also priced very competitively for small apps (you get 3 nodes free).
- paaaaaaaaaa 13y agoYour move, Microsoft Azure.