Announcing Micro Instances for Amazon EC2

http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2010/09/09/announcing-micro-instances-for-amazon-ec2/

by bpuvanathasan • 16 years ago

290 160 16 years ago

aws.amazon.com

muyyatin• 16 years ago

For approximately a quarter of the cost of small instances.

This may cut away at the incentive for people to start with Google App Engine.

pwpwp• 16 years ago

Hm... I don't see AWS and GAE playing in the same ballpark at the moment.

I'm sure AWS will continue to increase the convenience and ease-of-use of their services, and GAE will continue to increase the breadth of their services, but right now they seem to be targetted at quite different app-dev areas.

chrisboesing• 16 years ago

That is exactly the position I'm in right now. Was going to use GAE but now I'm rethinking that decision. A micro instance of their relational database service would be perfect for my use, but I guess the ram would be too small.

bkrausz2• 16 years ago

About time...at $15/mo these are now a viable competitor to generic VPSes.

staunch2• 16 years ago

$0.03 * 24 * 30 = $21/mo?

_delirium3• 16 years ago

The Linux instances are $0.02/hr.

caudicus• 16 years ago

Reserved instances (assuming you're going to use it for the full year, which of course is the big caveat) also bring the cost down to $0.007 an hour with an up-front investment of $54, so:

(($0.007 * 24 * 30)*12 + 54)/12 = $9.54 a month assuming you use it for the full year.

Edit: Also, as mentioned by _delirium, Linux instances are also $0.02 an hour. I did the Linux calculation but the same one with Windows goes at $0.012 per hour.

binomial• 16 years ago

Except that you have to pay separately for storage, as you have to use EBS: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#instance

cperciva2• 16 years ago

A comparable generic VPS might have 10-20 GB of storage, which only adds $1-2 to the monthly cost.

MichaelApproved• 16 years ago

Don't forget that static IP is extra. All bandwidth is extra. Memory is at a fixed limit (some VPS will let you burst above your assigned memory). No software like Plesk to help configure the box. Those things can add up.

Edit 1: I mistakenly said that static IP was extra when it's not while in use.

Edit 2: Storage is also extra.

bkrausz2• 16 years ago

Static IPs only cost money if you're not using them. For most small VPSes utilization is practically nothing. I'm not saying it will replace VPSes, but it's a valid competitor.

siong1987• 16 years ago

and, a reserved instance only costs about $10/mo.

raghus• 16 years ago

IIRC Jeff Bezos hinted at this when he spoke at Startup School a couple years ago

dfranke3• 16 years ago

He did, in reply to my question about whether it would ever happen. Now that it finally has, I'll be migrating over to EC2 shortly :-)

listic• 16 years ago

What exactly makes you migrate to EC2? It doesn't look cheaper or more reliable than VPS from a solid provider.

To be better positioned for rapid growth in the future?

johns6• 16 years ago

Maybe not as huge a deal for Linux instances, but this is HUGE for Windows users. There's nothing comparable elsewhere. The cheapest Rackspace Cloud instance is $0.08/hour for 1GB. There is no faster, cheaper way to spin up a Windows server than AWS now.

brc• 16 years ago

Yes but 600mb on a windows server doesn't give you a lot of room to play with. I'm struggling to think of a use-case but I'm sure there are many.

johns6• 16 years ago

Yeah, they're not going to run SQL Server. It's plenty for just serving up some simple stuff. I use the small instances mostly for testing stuff out with different configurations and running small short-term side projects. These will work perfectly for that.

smhinsey• 16 years ago

This seems like an excellent opportunity for hosting Server Core, particularly as a front-end web server.

PStamatiou• 16 years ago

Hrm I don't see the option?

http://cl.ly/0430c3a3f00c59743368

edit: only appears to be available with certain AMIs

spahl• 16 years ago

It only works with EBS backed AMIs.

dawson• 16 years ago

Can you use Microsoft SQL Server with Micro On-Demand Instances? The pricing doesn't offer a Windows and SQL Server Usage costing.

http://aws.amazon.com/windows/

johns6• 16 years ago

You probably could, but that's not really enough RAM to do anything worthwhile with SQL Server. And you'd have to install it yourself it appears.

mjallday• 16 years ago

The best option if you wanted to do this would be to install SQL Server Express since you're not going anywhere near the memory limit of 4 gig that that product is bound by.

That way you're not going to incur any licensing cost for SQL Server provided you can live with the DB having a file size limit of 4 gig.

azeroz• 16 years ago

Tried it with SQL Server Express on Server 2008, pushed RAM usage right up to ~530/613 MB before even starting SQL Server.

Regardless, I'm glad to see the offering. Was looking for something similar and with the bar of entry constantly getting lower by competition rising, am sure it'll find a niche.

mattjung• 16 years ago

Seems that EC2 feels some competitive pressure...Yet a big move that kills the (superficial) cost-argument against the Amazon offer.

swombat2• 16 years ago

I don't think that argument is superficial. At scale, Amazon is actually quite pricey. Currently, Amazon makes most sense if your site does have large variability in usage and if it makes use of the ability to spin up/down instances on demand. If you're an event-related site where usage goes up by a factor of 10-100 for a few hours every week, for example, Amazon makes a whole lot of sense.

However, if your usage is way up there all week long, it seems to me there are significantly cheaper alternatives, e.g. Hetzner servers.

jread8• 16 years ago

One of the biggest advantages to using EC2 is its scaling capabilities. EC2 offers 10 different instance sizes from m1.small to cc.4xlarge (with 10 Gbps clustering capabilities), 4 different regions, auto-scaling, load balancing, high availability via off-instance storage, durability via copying, GigE uplinks, and much more. You can't get that level of features from in any other IaaS cloud I am aware of. Yes, you might pay more than co-locating yourself or leasing some dedicated servers... but that isn't exactly an apples to apples comparison to EC2.

rbranson9• 16 years ago

Do you have a testing environment or multiple testing environments? Does it/Do they need to run all the time? If not, you save there. Do you like being able to spin up an entire duplicate of your environment to do environmental tests? You can't do that in normal server environments without ridiculous expenditure.

alex1• 16 years ago

It doesn't seem to be up on the pricing page yet (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/). Are 32-bit and 64-bit the same price?

johns6• 16 years ago

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing is where I see it now. I can't find anything that would indicate different prices for 32- or 64-bit.

madewulf2• 16 years ago

It seems there is no local storage included in the price.

I did not try, but that probably means complicated settings, which is a pity, since while the price could probably appeal to people launching side projects at minimal costs, like me, being a side project also means that not much time can be devoted to sysadminery.

johns6• 16 years ago

Go to the AWS console and launch one. It's pretty much as simple as it can be. They automatically use EBS so they're persistent. No special configuration required.

madewulf2• 16 years ago

Then it is really interesting. I have a few possible use cases in mind :

- we are hosting a little software load balancer for web services and it definitely does not need more than that

- thanks to the web service api of Amazon, it is relatively easy to set automated recovery plans, and the idea is very attractive, but until now I was detterred by the price.

- for small web applications with low bandwith, the price is good. For reserved instances, for one year, you pay 54$ up front, then 87.6$ for usage for the whole year, for a total of 141.6. That's a lot less than renting a server at linode.com for a year (~220$).

drtse42• 16 years ago

If you book a reserved instance, the price for lnx get as low as $0.01 ($54/yr). It's a bit premature but for spot instances, atm windows ones are around $0.0135 (linux history is not yet available). As for other instance-types it looks like that with spot instances you'll get the usual 60% off the original price.

EDIT: $54 upfront and then $0.01

mrb3• 16 years ago

$0.01/hr is $88/yr

aneth• 16 years ago

I'm an AWS user, and I also use Rackspace some, so interesting to find this article indicating you're better off with a small Rackspace instance than a medium AWS instance.

http://www.thebitsource.com/featured-posts/rackspace-cloud-s...

jread8• 16 years ago

This study was sponsored by Rackspace... I think the end results are questionable. Here is a study I wrote comparing AWS, Rackspace and some other cloud providers using some more standard benchmarking methods: http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchma...

forkqueue• 16 years ago

Anyone got any ideas why the strangely specific size of 613MB RAM?

mrb3• 16 years ago

Sure. They probably followed a similar reasoning (example with fictional numbers, but probably close to reality):

* They have 64GB RAM hosts.

* They want to dedicate only up to 85% of the RAM to the Xen instances (keep 15% for the host OS, buffercache, etc).

* The Operations/Management team decides to target an overall rate of $1.82/hr per host to achieve desirable profits.

* The AWS marketing department has a requirement that instances be priced $.xx/hr (no fractional cents) to evoke "simplicity".

* At a first pricing attempt, they see they have the choice of charging $.02/hr and assigning 65536 * .85 / (1.82 / .02) = 612MB per instance

* ...or charging $.03/hr and assigning 65536 * 0.85 / (1.82 / .03) = 918MB per instance

* They select the first option (612MB/instance) because it is deemed sufficiently smaller than the existing "small" 1.7GB instance offering, whereas 918MB was not small enough.

miyabo2• 16 years ago

I believe they're using chunks of RAM on each physical server to hold S3 objects. This might help explain where the "buffer/cache" is going to.

fierarul2• 16 years ago

This might just make me replace the Slicehost instance I use for Mercurial and build server. Elastic IP + EBS + micro instance makes a pretty nice low level machine.

It always bothered me that for a development server you are basically overpaying for bandwidth. Who cares I have 450GB bandwidth when I use maybe 30GB per month ?

YooLi2• 16 years ago

Try Rackspace Cloud Servers (Rackspace owns Slicehost too). Pretty much the same configs as slicehost except no bundled bandwidth so you only pay $11 a month.

No affiliation to them but I do have VPSs at both (slicehost for things that require lots of bandwidth).

fierarul2• 16 years ago

Yeah, I thought about that too, but apparently there is no way to migrate data (a slice) from Slicehost to Rackspace automatically.

And if I have to do it myself I might as well use Amazon, I use it for everything else anyhow.

mrb3• 16 years ago

I notice that, in a sense, AWS proves that the Total Cost of Ownership of Windows infrastructures is higher than the TCO of Linux infrastructures.

Amazon charges more for Windows instances across their entire offering. A Windows micro instance costs 50% more than a Linux micro instance ($.03/hr vs $.02/hr). This likely reflects Amazon's statistical studies on their EC2 datacenters that a Windows stack (OS + apps) uses on average more resources than a Linux stack, therefore more power costs, cooling costs, etc.

lars512• 16 years ago

I imagine the price difference also relates to licensing costs for Windows instances. Also, TCO is more than just compute efficiency, although the latter is important in its own right.

mellampudi• 16 years ago

Who said amazon charges according to what is costs them ? Infact, I CAN say, that, according to the market, windows is better than linux and hence amazon is charging more for windows machines.

YooLi2• 16 years ago

What mythical market are you referring to?

jasonkester• 16 years ago

It proves the part that wasn't in dispute. That is, that free software costs less to purchase than licensed software.

The TCO debate centers around the labor required to set up & maintain one versus the other.

That, incidentally, is why I run Windows on all my EC2 boxes.

andrevoget• 16 years ago

The spot prices are very low for the new Micro Instances. For Linux servers they are currently at $0.007/hour (about $5/month).

jread8• 16 years ago

A good strategy I've used with EC2 for the past 6 months is to always purchase spot instances using a bid price that is just slightly above the on-demand price. Generally spot pricing stays around the much lower reserve pricing but will occasionally spike. By doing this, you basically get reserve pricing without having to pay the upfront reserve fee, and can keep your spot instance online long term. This site provides some useful historical data on spot pricing: http://cloudexchange.org

grep4• 16 years ago

Can you keep your spot instance up 24/7?

d2viant• 16 years ago

What happens if everyone did this? Wouldn't the spot price then always reflect the on-demand price?

mchadwick2• 16 years ago

I have been horribly burned and disfigured following this advice. It's important to keep in mind that just because it's unlikely the spot price will go above the reserve price, there's nothing from preventing that. It has in the past, and it will again.

The important take away: Don't use spot instances unless you are 100% okay with the idea that your machines will disappear without warning at some point. Let that sink in.

jread8• 16 years ago

Here is a Geekbench benchmark report for one of these new micro instances: http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=287891 . It uses the same E5430 processors as the other m1 instances. CPU performance is about 2x m1.small based on these m1.small Geekbench results: http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=241412 and comparable to a rackspace 4GB server I also benchmarked: http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=243138.

drtse42• 16 years ago

Lower total score (higher fp, lower everything else) if your instance has an older Opteron 2218HE (us-east-1b) http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=287900

jread8• 16 years ago

To my knowledge (I've spun up many EC2 m1.small instances in all 4 regions), Opteron 2218s are only in use in us-east. The other 3 regions use E5430s.

_delirium3• 16 years ago

That CPU performance is consistent with what they give as the burst performance: up to 2 EC2 Compute Units, which should be 2x as much as the small instances' 1 ECU. Would be interesting to know how often/long you can burst, and what the non-burst baseline is, though.

bravura• 16 years ago

Why is it not possible to get Small Standard instances with 64-bit architectures?

This is the only instance that is missing 64-bit.

Even Micro instances offer 64-bit.

jread8• 16 years ago

c1.medium is also available only in 32-bit

simon_kun• 16 years ago

The real interest is in seeing what the downstream value added services do with this.

For example, I'm interested to see what changes this makes to the Heroku offering. It seems to be a perfect fit for their product.

grep4• 16 years ago

I hope EngineYard drop their prices a lot. I really want to use it but it's too expensive.

mayanks• 16 years ago

Same here. I am sure EngineYard will use this opportunity to provide services on micro-instances. It's going to be a big boost to EngineYard. Heroku, not as much I guess since they anyway run multiple dynos on a single m/c.

10ren3• 16 years ago

Aside: I looked into AWS a couple weeks ago, to play with a simple webapp idea, but the myriad choices, acronyms and signups confused me, and there was [seemed to be] no free options for getting started, and initial traction. It seems focussed on sophisticated enterprise users (nothing wrong with that). So, I went with google's App Engine, which was much simpler, and has been great. These micro-instances seem the same.

Did I give up too soon?

ryandvm• 16 years ago

If you can make your app fit within the significant limitations of App Engine, then it is a great service. I've used it for several projects from basic CMS to AJAX chat.

That said, sooner or later you'll want to do something that should seem possible on App Engine (e.g., image transformations with BufferedImage) and you'll hit a brick wall.

That's when I turn to a generic Ubuntu image running on EC2. It's not free, but with spot pricing it's awfully cheap. I expect spot pricing for this newest micro size to stabilize at around $10 a month.

10ren3• 16 years ago

Aside: How far off are we from renting our PCs in the cloud, and just having a local terminal? I know it's an old Failed Dream (mainframe-terminal, client-server, settop box etc), but maybe we're getting closer...

It seems a bit ridiculous, because you still need a bit of local power for display and fast reactions, and current iPhones/netbooks could do with more power. But desktop PC's have been fast enough in that respect for a while. An advantage of the cloud is that as RAM, cycle prices etc drop, you get it (more of them or cheaper) without the hassle of physically upgrading. And bursty usage is available too, eg. when compiling.

There's solid economics here: it's a sort of timesharing idea, instead of cycles being wasted while you type, someone else uses them to compile. Even more compelling globally - someone else uses them while you sleep. The same argument works for sharing your desktop's own cycles, p2p, but a centralized cloud has admin advantages and other economies of scale.

tibbon7• 16 years ago

OnLive has gotten pretty close with their gaming platform. They've shown demos of Autocad software and I believe Photoshop running with it.

10ren3• 16 years ago

OnLive sounds cool, but it's a little hard to believe, since latency is a common issue in regular gaming already. Demos are invariably carefully orchestrated. The other thing that gives me pause is that it is such a compelling vision for publishers. It's an absolutely magic idea. However, this enthusiasm is not technology-driven: it's not about what has become possible, but what would be really amazingly cool if it was possible.

But latency isn't such an issue for compiling etc. Someone was saying in the instant google thread that 250ms is imperceptible for search (and I've heard 200ms for the command line, from Rob Pike on Go). That's much lower hanging fruit than for gaming, where 250ms latency is far from instant but unplayable.

miyabo2• 16 years ago

I regularly use a cheap netbook as a terminal to an m1.large instance for development work. My scripts use spot instances to keep the price low--typically around $0.13/hr. Not for everyone, but it's saved me maybe $500 over buying a fast laptop. Unlike a laptop I can easily let others log into the system, leave it on for long compute jobs when I'm out of town, and don't have to worry as much about losing important data.

JoeAltmaier2• 16 years ago

The "failed dream" been successfull but never for long. As disk bandwidth and network bandwidth increase irregularly and leapfrog one another, it goes in and out of fashion.

eru• 16 years ago

Yes, but network bandwith (and latency) may become cheaper than local maintenance one day.

javery• 16 years ago

If you take a look at the sad state of this countries broadband infrastructure we are a long way off. I live in a "tech" city, I have two internet connections (Time Warner and ClearWire) patched together on a high-end router and I still wait for things I shouldn't have to.

blhack4• 16 years ago

How much of a speed increase do you see because of this setup?

Are these actually redundant carriers, or is the last leg owned by qwest and just leased to Time Warner and ClearWire?

pw• 16 years ago

I'd also be interested in hearing how and why you do this.

dedward2• 16 years ago

You can do it right now, as long as you aren't after video and gaming.

ewald• 16 years ago

http://www.onlive.com/

blhack4• 16 years ago

We already do.

My pictures are all stored "in the cloud" (on facebook, or flickr, or photobucket). "My" music doesn't even really exist anymore, it is playlists on grooveshark, or stations on pandora.

Documets? Google documents.

I do all of my web development on VIM running VPSs.

The only stuff that doesn't happen "in the cloud" is specialized, media-creation type things, an activity that I would be surprised if more than 5% of the population participates in.

peterwwillis2• 16 years ago

so you don't have a backup of any of your data?

mr_luc3• 16 years ago

$0.02/hr == approximately $14/mo if you leave it on.

Is this really $6/mo cheaper than a linode 512? That might be nice for personal projects.

I'm trying to teach myself some things that really need more than my local dev machine (puppet, backup strategies/more resilient code, learning cassandra). I've been running a bunch of VM's on my laptop, but my dev machine is a weakling and can't hardly handle it.

It almost seems like I could just spin up a dozen of these little instances for $2.88 per waking day and teach myself under substantially more "real" conditions on the cheap. That's something I'd love to have as an option on linode, given that teaching myself is a large part of what I use it for.

Is there any reason that wouldn't work? Is this too complicated in practice?

tibbon7• 16 years ago

None that I can see. I'm going to buy one reserved one, even though I have 7 hardware servers. I need to get better with the platform and for $54/year, the price is right

bdonlan2• 16 years ago

Remember, though, you still need to pay for EBS and bandwidth seperately.

mr_luc3• 16 years ago

Which should be pretty low if I'm the only user.

Linode doesn't charge you for bandwidth between nodes in the same datacenter -- is there something comparable in the EC2 world?

tasaro• 16 years ago

I haven't seen anyone mention the cost of IO requests associated with EBS. Quoted from http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/ :

As an example, a medium sized website database might be 100 GB in size and expect to average 100 I/Os per second over the course of a month. This would translate to $10 per month in storage costs (100 GB x $0.10/month), and approximately $26 per month in request costs (~2.6 million seconds/month x 100 I/O per second $0.10 per million I/O).

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jread8• 16 years ago

I'm running 4 m1.small EBS-backed LAMP servers in all 4 regions. I pay about $1/mo for EBS IO (8-11 million IO requests per instance per month). The servers get a few thousand hits per day. The cost of EBS IO should be minimal in most cases. The benefit of EBS versus the local storage you'll get with Rackspace or Linode is greater durability because it is off instance and AWS automatically duplicates the data. If the VM host system fails (i.e. power supply goes bad), you can bring your instance back online within a very short period of time on another host at the exact state it was at the time of failure.

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dedward2• 16 years ago

Yup - you could - this is a fantastic move by Amazon - this is the one thing that's been missing from my experimentation world - Linode is fantastic for the servers I run permanently there - I have no plans to remove them, but the commitment to an instance for a certain period of time is what keeps me from using it to work on deployment scenarious and whatnot. Amazon is fantastic for this (and has differnet constraints, of course)

This just brought AWS down into the realm of competition with the likes of Linode and others, and we can now figure out how to spin up a dozen nodes and work with all the innards of aws without worring about getting accidentally hosed on forgotten instances... works for me.

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_cbsz• 16 years ago

If you use a 1-year reserved instance, it'll cost you about $115/year, which is substantially cheaper than the lowest-priced Linode. I'll be switching http://mbusreloaded.com/ after its Linode subscription runs out, as there's absolutely no way I use more than 10 GB of bandwidth per year.

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tibbon7• 16 years ago

It quoted me at $54/year.

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kurokikaze• 16 years ago

I'm in the exact same situation with Riak + node.js developement. Micro instances seems like a good fit.

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petercooper• 16 years ago

One thing to note is that even EC2's "small" instance pales in comparison CPU-wise to even the low end Linodes. When playing with EC2, it blew me away how ridiculously slow they are until you get to the high levels (oddly it seemed the memory speed was also very poor - I had to wonder if even memory was networked somehow).

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alphabetum• 16 years ago

some corroboration: http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison

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rbranson9• 16 years ago

These instances are different though, they are able to burst CPU usage, just like Linode. AFAIK, none of the other EC2 instance sizes are able to do this.

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mr_luc3• 16 years ago

I took a few minutes to google a few terms, like "cassandra EC2" and so forth.

I get the general impression that doing anything architecture-y or deployment-y requires amazon-specific steps, steps that I don't have to take on a barebones ubuntu install. (of the 'Do this to get Thrift working on EC2' variety)

That sucks some activation energy away.

The ease/hurdles of VMs on my dev machine, even if performance is a bit of a bear, is still more attractive to me than doing anything Amazon-specific, because it's still all just unix.

I don't want to learn "Amazon", I want to learn [puppet, Cassandra, et al].

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tlrobinson• 16 years ago

Can Linode instances occasionally randomly be killed like EC2 instances, or do they offer stronger guarantees about uptime?

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jharrison• 16 years ago

Linode is a VPS provider, not a cloud provider like EC2. Instances are always on, not on-demand. If they are ever killed it would be because of some kind of outage but I've found that to be extremely rare in my experience. Slicehost has also been good for VPS.

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Spoutingshite• 16 years ago

AWS instances don't have persistent storage...if your server crashes you loose your data, the changes to your OS and even your IP.

AWS is great, but you can't compare the AWS instances with other VPS or Dedicated offerings.

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jbyers• 16 years ago

Micro instances don't have any local storage -- EBS only.

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mark_l_watson3• 16 years ago

One thing that is useful: if you like to keep several instances configured and 'ready to go' for your learning experiments, when you are done, don't terminate them, just stop them. You don't pay for stopped instances (but then you do pay 24 cents a day per unattached Elastic IP address).

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grep4• 16 years ago

What can we conclude about the performance comparing with Linode and Slicehost smaller offers? I'm curious if anyone has any conclusions.

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atomical• 16 years ago

I pay about $18 for hosting from a provider and get 500 gigs of transfer and 60 gigs of storage space. I was hoping this would be a real deal.

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enko• 16 years ago

This is a big deal for us mongodb fans, who were bitten badly by the small instance's 32 bit limitation. Sign me up.

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cschneid• 16 years ago

So how often do EC2 instances go down? Is it at hardware fail rate? or more often? Can I use this as a VPS replacement, and not have to worry about monitoring and fast restoration? (of non-important projects).

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mchadwick2• 16 years ago

We've been running hundreds of instances on EC2 for a couple years, and have never seen one just "go down." However, we will get notifications of "degraded instances." When an instance is degraded, you have some window (generally a couple days) to move the services running on that instance to another one. Even at the aforementioned scale, this happens maybe once every three to four months.

Can you use this as a VPS replacement? Probably. My guess is that your uptime will be no worse than some VPS provider. However, if you're storing information on the ephemeral storage, the onus is on you to get it to the new instance. I imagine that isn't generally the case on a VPS.

You may be able to mitigate this by using EBS (required in the case of these micro instances), but I've only used EBS a handful of times, and am no expert on the subject. If I understand their layout for these micro instances, it would simply be a matter of spinning up a new instance and spinning down the degraded node.

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mceachen2• 16 years ago

I think you'd need a pretty large sample set before you came to any reasonable conclusion.

I've been running ~10 nodes for AdGrok for the last 3 months, and we've already had one node fail (in that it wouldn't respond to any ec2 cli command to shut down or even terminate).

That hardware failure rate is about what I'd expect if it was our own colo and our own machines. Stuff always breaks.

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ary• 16 years ago

It's difficult to say. I've worked at two companies that have used EC2 for various purposes. One had an instance that was used for dev work get "corrupted" on three separate occasions (I couldn't get the specifics, but there were definitely I/O issues with the instance storage), and the other has been using the same production box for more than a year.

The bottom line is that EC2 installations need to be designed as semi-permanent. My preferred strategy is similar to how Google talks about their hardware (when they do), that any one server can go down at any time, but the overall setup is resilient to failure.

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rbranson9• 16 years ago

Now that there are very small instances with 64-bit support, these can form the basis of the ultimate incrementally scalable MongoDB cluster.

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mark_l_watson3• 16 years ago

My thought also, but be a little careful: you really want enough memory on mongod servers to keep the indices in memory.

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rbranson9• 16 years ago

It's my understanding that the indices would be sharded as well, so wouldn't you be able to just fire up more instances if the indices started to approach some kind of 80% figure?

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psadauskas2• 16 years ago

I put together a google spreadsheet of the EC2 instance pricing. US East / West only, so far.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AtNTMtkGNKnfdGJoajF...

$10/mo for 1 year reserved is pretty amazing.

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jefft• 16 years ago

don't forget the cost of the EBS volume. that'd be an extra $5/mo for 50GB of storage

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psadauskas2• 16 years ago

Yes, you're correct. But its the same $5 no matter what instance size you use, which is what this spreadsheet is for.

Also, on my small slicehost, I'm paying $20/mo for 1/3 the RAM, and using 6GB of disk, which would be $0.60 on EBS.

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astrodust3• 16 years ago

That's a lot cheaper than an extra 50GB on Linode.

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mceachen2• 16 years ago

I've been using the high-cpu medium instances (c1.medium) for our rails nodes, just to avoid the slothy m1.small CPU. It seems like these are tailor-made for running either haproxy or your web tier!

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cmelbye• 16 years ago

This is awesome, now it's super affordable for me to run beanstalkd and a few queue workers as necessary and communicate with my Heroku app over the Amazon private network.

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rjurney• 16 years ago

Very impressed that these are available in 64 bit. That means that one OS image can scale from micro to ginormous. WIN.

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jasonrowland• 16 years ago

The Amazon EC2 is sooo slow. I spun up an instance for Amazon and Rackspace both to see how long it would take to render a frame in Blender. It is shocking how slow the difference was. I didn't do an apples-to-apples comparison, but the Rackspace blender 64bit 2.49b rendered in 47 seconds. The Amazon linux blender 2.48 rendered in 17 minutes!

http://www.jasonrowland.com/2010/09/amazon-vs-rackspace-for-...

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Announcing Micro Instances for Amazon EC2

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