15 ms·

Low Cost EC2 Instances With Burstable Performance

231 points by jeffbarr 12y ago

zrail 12y ago
Super interesting. If I did the math right, a 3year heavy reserved t2.micro instance comes out to $4.48/mo, which is cost competitive with Digital Ocean. The proof will come in the benchmarks, but this may become my preferred hosting solution.
- mathrawka 12y ago
  That assumes that Digital Ocean doesn't improve their offering via a hardware upgrade or price discount in the next 3 years.
  - lelf 12y ago
    You can be pretty sure Amazon will do that too
    - _delirium 12y ago
      They will, but only for people who didn't lock in a reserved instance. Amazon doesn't typically upgrade instance types, but rather introduces new ones. So if you lock in a t2.micro instance for a 3-year reserved period, you are stuck with exactly those specs for 3 years. If they introduce a t3.* instance class next year, you don't get a free upgrade to the new specs.
      - arturhoo 12y ago
        A year or so ago, they introduced the ability to change the instance type between the same family type [1]. [1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-modifying.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-modify...
        _delirium 12y ago
        That increases the flexibility, but afaict doesn't help with the upgradeability angle. When Amazon passes along the technological dividend by creating new instances with a better price/performance profile, it's usually as new family types. So your reserved t2.* instance can swap with other t2.* instances, but won't be able to take advantage of any t3.* instance that's introduced in the future. It's not a huge deal, just something to take into account when projecting out costs: the 3-year reserved instances are locking in today's prices until 2017, in return for a discount over today's non-reserved prices. Whether this produces long term gains requires some assumptions about how the market will change over the next 3 years.
    - lsc 12y ago
      The interesting thing about Amazon (vs the VPS market, where DigitalOcean, Linode, and I live) is that when amazon lowers prices, they lower prices for existing customers who don't make changes to their accounts. When a VPS provider like Linode lowers their prices, they usually charge existing customers the same amount, and simply give them more resources. Just an observation. I'm not criticizing either way of doing things; obviously, lowering prices straight out is better for the customer, and keeping revenue stable while just upgrading hardware is better for the provider. Last time I lowered prices, I lowered prices directly, and just took the revenue hit. I'm planning my next upgrade now, and instead of lowering prices, I plan on giving everyone more ram/disk/ssd, while holding prices steady. It is something I've thought about... the problem is that I'm going to have to go down by more than half, and it's way easier to lease enough hardware to more than double everyone's allocations than it is to double my customer base to make up for the lost revenue.
      - jwn 12y ago
        Perhaps I have selective memory, but I've never seen Linode lower prices, they just keep upping the specs on the lowest tier. It reminds me of something I learned while working for Comcast years ago - never lower prices, just keep adding "value".
        lsc 12y ago
        >Perhaps I have selective memory, but I've never seen Linode lower prices, they just keep upping the specs on the lowest tier. Yes, exactly. I'm saying that is the standard way to do it in the VPS market, in part because until D.O. most of us were self-funding, and it's way easier to pay for double the compute resources than to deal with a 50% cut in revenue. In the "cloud" market where amazon is, the standard way to do it is to directly lower prices.
      - koko775 12y ago
        As one of your customers, I've already committed $X to my instance. I would be delighted to get 2x resources compared to .5x cost.
    - asharpe 12y ago
      Be careful here. Despite announcing 42 price reductions over the 7 years of AWS existence, the M1 tier was only reduced for the first time in 3 years after Google/Azure dropped their pricing. They push through a huge number of price drops, but sometimes (actually often) their headline drop is one very small, unique charge, leaving everything else unaffected.
- livid 12y ago
  Pricing plans of DigitalOcean and Linode included some free data transfer, while you will need to pay for data transfer on AWS.
  - adventured 12y ago
    And that's worth quite a lot, given Amazon's bandwidth is expensive. The 2tb in the Linode $10 account will run you about $200 with Amazon. Doubtful anyone is burning 2tb on a $10 account, and I'm sure Linode has that in mind, but even if you're using 200gb of bandwidth that would still cost you over $20.
  - threeseed 12y ago
    Pricing plans for Amazon also include the best security and interconnects bar none, fastest access to the wide array of AWS and AWS hosted services and an ecosystem of tools and apps. And of course Amazon has transparent disclosure for outages and security issues unlike say Linode.
  - rogerdpack 12y ago
    don't forget that the network transfer from an aws server may be slower than from a linode/DO as well. Any benchmarks out there?
- keytomouse 12y ago
  It's $77 for 1 year reserved if I'm reading it correctly. That's $6.44 per month for an instance with double the RAM of the DO $5 instance. The specs look like the size that DO is charging $10 for currently. For a 3 year reserved instance it's $4.48 a month for double the size of the DO $5 instance. There's also a free tier, so the first year is free to try it out. DO was competitive with EC2 on price but not on features (and certainly not on security), now with the price advantage gone... EDIT: corrected calculation
  - adamors 12y ago
    The price of an EC2 instance doesn't include data transfer though. For the $5 DO instance you get 1TB of traffic for free. The price advantage is definitely not gone.
    - keytomouse 12y ago
      How many customers use more than 1GB of outbound traffic per month for a $5 server? Data transfer in is free on EC2 and the first 1GB outbound is free too according to the pricing page.
      - jlawer 12y ago
        Isn't the first GB of your account traffic free with AWS vs DO giving you 1 TB per droplet? While 1 EC2 instance may not use more then 1 GB (which is a very low quota unless your CDNing everything), if you have a couple of instances your almost certainly going over that.
  - penguindev 12y ago
    $51 is only the up front fee. It's $77 for the year, plus you need an EBS volume - say $6 for a magnetic disk 10 GB EBS, or $12 for an SSD.
    - keytomouse 12y ago
      ok, so about $6.90 per month for 1 year then including storage. Thats still less than a 1GB RAM DO server which goes for $10 per month, and much less if you go for 3 years. Factoring in 1 year of free tier makes it even less.
- bhouston 12y ago
  The issue is that this offering is complex to understand as opposed to DO which is incredibly simple to understand. It is actually pretty funny how hard it is to understand this offering from AWS, it takes many paragraphs of reading to figure it out.
  - wmf 12y ago
    There's nothing to understand with DO because they don't tell you what their definition of a "CPU" is. For all I know it could be oversubscribed in a worse way than EC2.
    - rogerdpack 12y ago
      I typically get 97% of one core for my $5 instance, FWIW (or 100, depending on load of the box, I presume).
    - dm2 12y ago
      Most people don't care the exact speed of the CPU for a server, as long as it's stable and doesn't lockup with little load, especially when purchasing a Micro instance. If CPU utilization is high then it's time to upgrade to another CPU or start another instance if possible. It would be better to do real speed tests of each service to determine average "CPU" speed. I'm sure both services are constantly optimizing for both shared hardware usage and speed, so the stats would have to be updated regularly.
      - wmf 12y ago
        So if you don't care you shouldn't penalize Amazon for telling you how it works.
  - twistedpair 12y ago
    AWS is a simple model: pay for what you use. Most cheap hosts (i.e. please kill me DreamHost) give you no SLA and your rolling the uptime dice. Three years on DH and I wanted to kill myself. Three years on AWS and life is just splendid! To understand your billing, you need to understand what you're consuming, which you always should. These credits add a little wrinkle, but also make the service cheaper and more deterministic. If you have credits, you'll get the CPU you bought with them.
- AJ72 12y ago
  I would replace 'super interesting' with 'Super complex'. It's an example of how you can make the price of a $10-40/mo server complex to the extent that you need to read the blog post numerous times before you understand the construct. And even then, one still needs to factor in the 'other' costs like I/O or IOPs, disk (persistent/EBS), IPs, internet and inter-region data transfer… before you understand the real cost. And then you need to compare to other instance types (which soon will cover the full alphabet -- c, cg, cr, g, h, i, m, r, t… ) and then other providers. You still have several unresolved issue - 1. Are your assumption on usage (cpu, I/O, internet etc) correct? Will they change? 2. How do I compare performance across providers for a given VM specification. 3. Can I get support when I need it? And I am sure there are others It certainly means there is room for other players who just make it simple, whether they are infrastructure folk (like DO/Linode etc) or platform plays that make the pricing understandable by the audience they are trying to target (like Heroku/Ninefold)
bowlofpetunias 12y ago
> The T2 instances use Hardware Virtualization (HVM) in order to get the best possible performance from the underlying CPU and you will need to use an HVM AMI. I've always used paravirtual AMI's, as I understood that gets the best performance for a Linux box. Given that I try to use the same self-baked base AMI's for various purposes (and instance sizes), I would either have to mix and match or switch everything to HVM. However, I have no clue what the practical consequences of that would be. Can anybody enlighten me?
- helper 12y ago
  HVM vs PV is confusing because as Xen improves the performance characteristics of the two modes change. Brenden Gregg covered the differences in quite some detail in a recent blog post [1]. Basically, if you are running a new enough kernel on the guest os you will get better performance from HVM. [1]: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-05-07/what-color-is-your-xen.html http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-05-07/what-color-is-yo...
- caw 12y ago
  HVM gives the best performance because you can take advantage of certain hardware features through the hypervisor. It's basically more direct access to the hardware, which makes it faster as you don't have as much hypervisor overhead. Amazon's "enhanced" networking and SSDs need HVM to get a good chunk of performance. Yes you'd have to build new AMIs with HVM. It'd be easiest if you had some kind of configuration management so you didn't need as many AMIs baked. When I build machines I use a script to handle the creation and mounting any extra volumes on a machine that I have as "nonstandard". I have only 2 custom AMIs - one for PV and the other for HVM. You'll need to have at least both, because if you wanted to use certain instances (t1.micro, m1.small come to mind) you can only use PV.
jasonkester 12y ago
Any thoughts on how this compares to simply spinning up a standard instance for a few hours then turning it off when you don't need it? I run a service that needs to run about 72 hours worth of processing each day, and it all needs to happen during a 3 hour window. That's a natural fit for spinning up a couple dozen instances then killing them when they finish. I'd love to see a comparison of what would happen if I kept the same amount of compute power on standby 24/7 using this new instance type.
- adventured 12y ago
  Well a c3.xlarge is $0.21 per hour (their "compute optimized current generation cpu" line). 24 * $0.21 = $5.04 per hour You could burn those for two hours, almost, to match the lowest $9.50 per month cost of what they're talking about in the blog. The c3 approach would give you 96 vCPUs during that time. The t2 micro for $9.36 or whatever per month, gives you one vCPU. I'd have to strongly favor spinning up 24 to 48 instances of the c3 large and clocking the job in one to three hours if possible.
  - twistedpair 12y ago
    Burstable jobs? This is where Spot Requests shine. Current spot price for c3.xlarge is $0.032/hr 24 * $0.032 = $0.78 per hour I run all my CI infrastructure from spots for dirty cheap. Sure, it could all be yanked out from under me, but it's been running non-stop for over a year now. Plus, it keeps you from making "special snowflake" instances that you shouldn't. A minute and Puppet/Chef have got you a splendid new instance. ;)
- 6cxs2hd6 12y ago
  It seems like this fits two needs, for smaller companies and/or people just getting started with EC2. 1. Laziness. Which I don't necessarily mean in a pejorative sense. Maybe someone just doesn't have time, yet, to learn/configure/maintain spinning up an instance for limited times. 2. Single instance. To spin up an instance, you need another computer. If you want that "manager" computer to be an instance at EC2, too, now you need two instances. With this approach, you can set up just one instance and get much of the same economic benefit. EDIT: Also... 3. Predictable cost. If your manual spun-up instance turns out to need to run for 4 hours instead of 2, you get a bigger bill. With the t2 instances, you'll get a slower compute (if you run out of "credits") but not a bigger bill. Again, this probably appeals most to small/new customers?
Andys 12y ago
Also known as Amazon Droplets
gfunk911 12y ago
This seems really amazing. This workload pattern matches almost all of my small projects.
sdfjkl 12y ago
This looks like it's a reaction to (and effective solution for) the problem with t1 instances that made them largely useless (or a gamble at best) due to sharing a CPU with instances that run at full load all the time.
growt 12y ago
Maybe I did something wrong with the setup but the disks (type gp2) are really slow compared with linode and digitalocean: ubuntu@aws:~$ dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 23.1199 s, 46.4 MB/s ubuntu@aws:~$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/disk/by-label/cloudimg-rootfs /dev/disk/by-label/cloudimg-rootfs: Timing cached reads: 23292 MB in 1.99 seconds = 11704.62 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 232 MB in 3.02 seconds = 76.70 MB/sec
- jakozaur 12y ago
  Do you run this tests with EBS optimized? Only with that you get guaranteed bandwidth to your disk and without that network may be the bottleneck.
  - timdorr 12y ago
    The t2 instances can't be EBS optimized.
- api 12y ago
  EC2 is generally very expensive for CPU. RAM and storage are okay but CPU is crazy. Anyone know what recommends EC2 over Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode, etc.? Are they more reliable? Enterprise features? Network bandwidth? Cause right now they look hugely overpriced. I've hosted on Digital Ocean and Vultr for some time and my uptime is great on both. I run constant ping testing and I do see little glitches from time to time between data centers, but that could be network weather on the global backbone. (I have a geo-distributed architecture so there's stuff running at five different locations.)
  - gtaylor 12y ago
    You can't look at EC2 as just a place to go for a VM. It's not worth using EC2 unless you either: A) Already have a lot of other infrastructure on EC2. B) Want to use the other services offered by AWS. AWS is a collection of services and APIs that you can compose to build big, complex, scalable things. If you just need a VM host, AWS should be the last place you look. On the flipside, if you have an application that could benefit from outsourcing some of your infrastructure, AWS could save you time and money. For example, we have AWS managing our DB server (RDS), Load Balancing (ELB), Redis/Memcache servers (ElastiCache), static media storage (S3), DNS (Route53), and some of our CDN capacity (CloudFront). We can manage all of these through the same API client (boto), and the inter-service latency is typically low.
aurelianito 12y ago
I thought that cost was dominated by memory utilization instead of CPU utilization. How can AWS manage to pull this off?
- jewel 12y ago
  That was my understanding too. At $9.50/mo, a server with 96GB of RAM would bring in $912/mo. A quick click around dell finds that a mid-range 1U rackmount server (R320) with that much RAM costs $3,135. So a back-of-the-envelope calculation makes it seem workable, especially for high-RAM low-CPU configurations, which is what this is. There are other tricks that they might be employing, such as swapping out part of RAM to SSDs behind the scenes, as well as compressing RAM contents. On low-load servers like these, typical usage would imply that RAM would be mostly static.
- wmf 12y ago
  These instances have almost no memory. A physical server has 16GB/core and it looks like Amazon is putting 10 1GB instances on each core.
philsnow 12y ago
> This deceleration process takes place over the course of a 15 minute interval in order to provide a smooth and pleasant experience for your users. The thrashing will increase gradually until user experience is pleasant.
Vieira 12y ago
This looks a nice way to experiment with CoreOS as it is not supported by DO or Linode but an AMI is available.
Nakatomi_Plaza 12y ago
Any recommendations for software builds? I usually go with c3.4xlarge for building Android platforms but wondering if there are alternatives out there.
NhanH 12y ago
What would be the recommendation for cloud provider with high IO throughput (as oppose to memory/ cpu throughput)?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

231 points by jeffbarr 12y ago

zrail 12y ago

Super interesting. If I did the math right, a 3year heavy reserved t2.micro instance comes out to $4.48/mo, which is cost competitive with Digital Ocean. The proof will come in the benchmarks, but this may become my preferred hosting solution.

mathrawka 12y ago
That assumes that Digital Ocean doesn't improve their offering via a hardware upgrade or price discount in the next 3 years.
- lelf 12y ago
  You can be pretty sure Amazon will do that too
  - _delirium 12y ago
    They will, but only for people who didn't lock in a reserved instance. Amazon doesn't typically upgrade instance types, but rather introduces new ones. So if you lock in a t2.micro instance for a 3-year reserved period, you are stuck with exactly those specs for 3 years. If they introduce a t3.* instance class next year, you don't get a free upgrade to the new specs.
    - arturhoo 12y ago
      A year or so ago, they introduced the ability to change the instance type between the same family type [1]. [1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-modifying.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-modify...
      - _delirium 12y ago
        That increases the flexibility, but afaict doesn't help with the upgradeability angle. When Amazon passes along the technological dividend by creating new instances with a better price/performance profile, it's usually as new family types. So your reserved t2.* instance can swap with other t2.* instances, but won't be able to take advantage of any t3.* instance that's introduced in the future. It's not a huge deal, just something to take into account when projecting out costs: the 3-year reserved instances are locking in today's prices until 2017, in return for a discount over today's non-reserved prices. Whether this produces long term gains requires some assumptions about how the market will change over the next 3 years.
  - lsc 12y ago
    The interesting thing about Amazon (vs the VPS market, where DigitalOcean, Linode, and I live) is that when amazon lowers prices, they lower prices for existing customers who don't make changes to their accounts. When a VPS provider like Linode lowers their prices, they usually charge existing customers the same amount, and simply give them more resources. Just an observation. I'm not criticizing either way of doing things; obviously, lowering prices straight out is better for the customer, and keeping revenue stable while just upgrading hardware is better for the provider. Last time I lowered prices, I lowered prices directly, and just took the revenue hit. I'm planning my next upgrade now, and instead of lowering prices, I plan on giving everyone more ram/disk/ssd, while holding prices steady. It is something I've thought about... the problem is that I'm going to have to go down by more than half, and it's way easier to lease enough hardware to more than double everyone's allocations than it is to double my customer base to make up for the lost revenue.
    - jwn 12y ago
      Perhaps I have selective memory, but I've never seen Linode lower prices, they just keep upping the specs on the lowest tier. It reminds me of something I learned while working for Comcast years ago - never lower prices, just keep adding "value".
      - lsc 12y ago
        >Perhaps I have selective memory, but I've never seen Linode lower prices, they just keep upping the specs on the lowest tier. Yes, exactly. I'm saying that is the standard way to do it in the VPS market, in part because until D.O. most of us were self-funding, and it's way easier to pay for double the compute resources than to deal with a 50% cut in revenue. In the "cloud" market where amazon is, the standard way to do it is to directly lower prices.
    - koko775 12y ago
      As one of your customers, I've already committed $X to my instance. I would be delighted to get 2x resources compared to .5x cost.
  - asharpe 12y ago
    Be careful here. Despite announcing 42 price reductions over the 7 years of AWS existence, the M1 tier was only reduced for the first time in 3 years after Google/Azure dropped their pricing. They push through a huge number of price drops, but sometimes (actually often) their headline drop is one very small, unique charge, leaving everything else unaffected.
livid 12y ago
Pricing plans of DigitalOcean and Linode included some free data transfer, while you will need to pay for data transfer on AWS.
- adventured 12y ago
  And that's worth quite a lot, given Amazon's bandwidth is expensive. The 2tb in the Linode $10 account will run you about $200 with Amazon. Doubtful anyone is burning 2tb on a $10 account, and I'm sure Linode has that in mind, but even if you're using 200gb of bandwidth that would still cost you over $20.
- threeseed 12y ago
  Pricing plans for Amazon also include the best security and interconnects bar none, fastest access to the wide array of AWS and AWS hosted services and an ecosystem of tools and apps. And of course Amazon has transparent disclosure for outages and security issues unlike say Linode.
- rogerdpack 12y ago
  don't forget that the network transfer from an aws server may be slower than from a linode/DO as well. Any benchmarks out there?
keytomouse 12y ago
It's $77 for 1 year reserved if I'm reading it correctly. That's $6.44 per month for an instance with double the RAM of the DO $5 instance. The specs look like the size that DO is charging $10 for currently. For a 3 year reserved instance it's $4.48 a month for double the size of the DO $5 instance. There's also a free tier, so the first year is free to try it out. DO was competitive with EC2 on price but not on features (and certainly not on security), now with the price advantage gone... EDIT: corrected calculation
- adamors 12y ago
  The price of an EC2 instance doesn't include data transfer though. For the $5 DO instance you get 1TB of traffic for free. The price advantage is definitely not gone.
  - keytomouse 12y ago
    How many customers use more than 1GB of outbound traffic per month for a $5 server? Data transfer in is free on EC2 and the first 1GB outbound is free too according to the pricing page.
    - jlawer 12y ago
      Isn't the first GB of your account traffic free with AWS vs DO giving you 1 TB per droplet? While 1 EC2 instance may not use more then 1 GB (which is a very low quota unless your CDNing everything), if you have a couple of instances your almost certainly going over that.
- penguindev 12y ago
  $51 is only the up front fee. It's $77 for the year, plus you need an EBS volume - say $6 for a magnetic disk 10 GB EBS, or $12 for an SSD.
  - keytomouse 12y ago
    ok, so about $6.90 per month for 1 year then including storage. Thats still less than a 1GB RAM DO server which goes for $10 per month, and much less if you go for 3 years. Factoring in 1 year of free tier makes it even less.
bhouston 12y ago
The issue is that this offering is complex to understand as opposed to DO which is incredibly simple to understand. It is actually pretty funny how hard it is to understand this offering from AWS, it takes many paragraphs of reading to figure it out.
- wmf 12y ago
  There's nothing to understand with DO because they don't tell you what their definition of a "CPU" is. For all I know it could be oversubscribed in a worse way than EC2.
  - rogerdpack 12y ago
    I typically get 97% of one core for my $5 instance, FWIW (or 100, depending on load of the box, I presume).
  - dm2 12y ago
    Most people don't care the exact speed of the CPU for a server, as long as it's stable and doesn't lockup with little load, especially when purchasing a Micro instance. If CPU utilization is high then it's time to upgrade to another CPU or start another instance if possible. It would be better to do real speed tests of each service to determine average "CPU" speed. I'm sure both services are constantly optimizing for both shared hardware usage and speed, so the stats would have to be updated regularly.
    - wmf 12y ago
      So if you don't care you shouldn't penalize Amazon for telling you how it works.
- twistedpair 12y ago
  AWS is a simple model: pay for what you use. Most cheap hosts (i.e. please kill me DreamHost) give you no SLA and your rolling the uptime dice. Three years on DH and I wanted to kill myself. Three years on AWS and life is just splendid! To understand your billing, you need to understand what you're consuming, which you always should. These credits add a little wrinkle, but also make the service cheaper and more deterministic. If you have credits, you'll get the CPU you bought with them.
AJ72 12y ago
I would replace 'super interesting' with 'Super complex'. It's an example of how you can make the price of a $10-40/mo server complex to the extent that you need to read the blog post numerous times before you understand the construct. And even then, one still needs to factor in the 'other' costs like I/O or IOPs, disk (persistent/EBS), IPs, internet and inter-region data transfer… before you understand the real cost. And then you need to compare to other instance types (which soon will cover the full alphabet -- c, cg, cr, g, h, i, m, r, t… ) and then other providers. You still have several unresolved issue - 1. Are your assumption on usage (cpu, I/O, internet etc) correct? Will they change? 2. How do I compare performance across providers for a given VM specification. 3. Can I get support when I need it? And I am sure there are others It certainly means there is room for other players who just make it simple, whether they are infrastructure folk (like DO/Linode etc) or platform plays that make the pricing understandable by the audience they are trying to target (like Heroku/Ninefold)

bowlofpetunias 12y ago

> The T2 instances use Hardware Virtualization (HVM) in order to get the best possible performance from the underlying CPU and you will need to use an HVM AMI. I've always used paravirtual AMI's, as I understood that gets the best performance for a Linux box. Given that I try to use the same self-baked base AMI's for various purposes (and instance sizes), I would either have to mix and match or switch everything to HVM. However, I have no clue what the practical consequences of that would be. Can anybody enlighten me?

helper 12y ago
HVM vs PV is confusing because as Xen improves the performance characteristics of the two modes change. Brenden Gregg covered the differences in quite some detail in a recent blog post [1]. Basically, if you are running a new enough kernel on the guest os you will get better performance from HVM. [1]: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-05-07/what-color-is-your-xen.html http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-05-07/what-color-is-yo...
caw 12y ago
HVM gives the best performance because you can take advantage of certain hardware features through the hypervisor. It's basically more direct access to the hardware, which makes it faster as you don't have as much hypervisor overhead. Amazon's "enhanced" networking and SSDs need HVM to get a good chunk of performance. Yes you'd have to build new AMIs with HVM. It'd be easiest if you had some kind of configuration management so you didn't need as many AMIs baked. When I build machines I use a script to handle the creation and mounting any extra volumes on a machine that I have as "nonstandard". I have only 2 custom AMIs - one for PV and the other for HVM. You'll need to have at least both, because if you wanted to use certain instances (t1.micro, m1.small come to mind) you can only use PV.

jasonkester 12y ago

Any thoughts on how this compares to simply spinning up a standard instance for a few hours then turning it off when you don't need it? I run a service that needs to run about 72 hours worth of processing each day, and it all needs to happen during a 3 hour window. That's a natural fit for spinning up a couple dozen instances then killing them when they finish. I'd love to see a comparison of what would happen if I kept the same amount of compute power on standby 24/7 using this new instance type.

adventured 12y ago
Well a c3.xlarge is $0.21 per hour (their "compute optimized current generation cpu" line). 24 * $0.21 = $5.04 per hour You could burn those for two hours, almost, to match the lowest $9.50 per month cost of what they're talking about in the blog. The c3 approach would give you 96 vCPUs during that time. The t2 micro for $9.36 or whatever per month, gives you one vCPU. I'd have to strongly favor spinning up 24 to 48 instances of the c3 large and clocking the job in one to three hours if possible.
- twistedpair 12y ago
  Burstable jobs? This is where Spot Requests shine. Current spot price for c3.xlarge is $0.032/hr 24 * $0.032 = $0.78 per hour I run all my CI infrastructure from spots for dirty cheap. Sure, it could all be yanked out from under me, but it's been running non-stop for over a year now. Plus, it keeps you from making "special snowflake" instances that you shouldn't. A minute and Puppet/Chef have got you a splendid new instance. ;)
6cxs2hd6 12y ago
It seems like this fits two needs, for smaller companies and/or people just getting started with EC2. 1. Laziness. Which I don't necessarily mean in a pejorative sense. Maybe someone just doesn't have time, yet, to learn/configure/maintain spinning up an instance for limited times. 2. Single instance. To spin up an instance, you need another computer. If you want that "manager" computer to be an instance at EC2, too, now you need two instances. With this approach, you can set up just one instance and get much of the same economic benefit. EDIT: Also... 3. Predictable cost. If your manual spun-up instance turns out to need to run for 4 hours instead of 2, you get a bigger bill. With the t2 instances, you'll get a slower compute (if you run out of "credits") but not a bigger bill. Again, this probably appeals most to small/new customers?

Andys 12y ago

Also known as Amazon Droplets

gfunk911 12y ago

This seems really amazing. This workload pattern matches almost all of my small projects.

sdfjkl 12y ago

This looks like it's a reaction to (and effective solution for) the problem with t1 instances that made them largely useless (or a gamble at best) due to sharing a CPU with instances that run at full load all the time.

growt 12y ago

Maybe I did something wrong with the setup but the disks (type gp2) are really slow compared with linode and digitalocean: ubuntu@aws:~$ dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 23.1199 s, 46.4 MB/s ubuntu@aws:~$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/disk/by-label/cloudimg-rootfs /dev/disk/by-label/cloudimg-rootfs: Timing cached reads: 23292 MB in 1.99 seconds = 11704.62 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 232 MB in 3.02 seconds = 76.70 MB/sec

jakozaur 12y ago
Do you run this tests with EBS optimized? Only with that you get guaranteed bandwidth to your disk and without that network may be the bottleneck.
- timdorr 12y ago
  The t2 instances can't be EBS optimized.
api 12y ago
EC2 is generally very expensive for CPU. RAM and storage are okay but CPU is crazy. Anyone know what recommends EC2 over Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode, etc.? Are they more reliable? Enterprise features? Network bandwidth? Cause right now they look hugely overpriced. I've hosted on Digital Ocean and Vultr for some time and my uptime is great on both. I run constant ping testing and I do see little glitches from time to time between data centers, but that could be network weather on the global backbone. (I have a geo-distributed architecture so there's stuff running at five different locations.)
- gtaylor 12y ago
  You can't look at EC2 as just a place to go for a VM. It's not worth using EC2 unless you either: A) Already have a lot of other infrastructure on EC2. B) Want to use the other services offered by AWS. AWS is a collection of services and APIs that you can compose to build big, complex, scalable things. If you just need a VM host, AWS should be the last place you look. On the flipside, if you have an application that could benefit from outsourcing some of your infrastructure, AWS could save you time and money. For example, we have AWS managing our DB server (RDS), Load Balancing (ELB), Redis/Memcache servers (ElastiCache), static media storage (S3), DNS (Route53), and some of our CDN capacity (CloudFront). We can manage all of these through the same API client (boto), and the inter-service latency is typically low.

aurelianito 12y ago

I thought that cost was dominated by memory utilization instead of CPU utilization. How can AWS manage to pull this off?

jewel 12y ago
That was my understanding too. At $9.50/mo, a server with 96GB of RAM would bring in $912/mo. A quick click around dell finds that a mid-range 1U rackmount server (R320) with that much RAM costs $3,135. So a back-of-the-envelope calculation makes it seem workable, especially for high-RAM low-CPU configurations, which is what this is. There are other tricks that they might be employing, such as swapping out part of RAM to SSDs behind the scenes, as well as compressing RAM contents. On low-load servers like these, typical usage would imply that RAM would be mostly static.
wmf 12y ago
These instances have almost no memory. A physical server has 16GB/core and it looks like Amazon is putting 10 1GB instances on each core.

philsnow 12y ago

> This deceleration process takes place over the course of a 15 minute interval in order to provide a smooth and pleasant experience for your users. The thrashing will increase gradually until user experience is pleasant.

Vieira 12y ago

This looks a nice way to experiment with CoreOS as it is not supported by DO or Linode but an AMI is available.

Nakatomi_Plaza 12y ago

Any recommendations for software builds? I usually go with c3.4xlarge for building Android platforms but wondering if there are alternatives out there.

NhanH 12y ago

What would be the recommendation for cloud provider with high IO throughput (as oppose to memory/ cpu throughput)?

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