New T3 Instances – Burstable, Cost-Effective Performance

Baseline pricing looks about 10% cheaper for workloads that won't trigger lots of bursting. This looks like a good a choice for services that aren't CPU bound.

marcinzm• 8 years ago

If the instance runs at higher CPU utilization for a prolonged period, there will be an additional charge of $0.05 per vCPU-hour.

This seems to be the same as the T2 unlimited instances. Interesting that it's now the default and only (?) option.

gregdunn4• 8 years ago

It's not the only option - it can be disabled, the same as on T2 instances.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/t2-unlim... has documentation on disabling it.

(Disclosure: I work at AWS, not posting in an official capacity)

sciurus• 8 years ago

I'm very glad they changed the default to unlimited. The old default behavior of throttling was a just an outage waiting to happen, and it was more painful to opt into unlimited via Cloudformation than it should have been.

rubbingalcohol• 8 years ago

I'm not sure I understand, they're basically selling you less than one continuous CPU thread and upcharging if you use a full core? So suppose the machine has 56 cores and they're putting 3 customers on each vCPU. What happens in the case that everyone needs to burst to the full performance of each thread they're paying for (56 * 3)? I imagine they'd price that as if you utilized 100% but give you degraded performance due to hardware limitations.

Please correct me if I'm wrong but this sounds like "unlimited shared hosting for people who can SSH" (except you pay extra instead of unlimited)

awsinside• 8 years ago

T2 and T3 use live migration to get around this, but it's not public knowledge.

wmf• 8 years ago

What happens in the case that everyone needs to burst to the full performance of each thread they're paying for (56 3)? I imagine they'd price that as if you utilized 100% but give you degraded performance*

There's no reason to assume that. The hypervisor can track how much time each VM actually executed and subtract credits appropriately. AWS pricing is generally high enough that they don't need to use undocumented gotchas.

I would say it's more like shared hosting with full AWS API and ecosystem compatibility. Shared hosting for people who can SSH is Digital Ocean.

skywhopper• 8 years ago

I'm going to guess that AWS is slightly more sophisticated than this, and has good data showing that the vast majority of users of this sort of instance type basically sit idle all the time. Certain customers may consistently max out their t3 instances, but those instances would be spread across thousands of host boxes, sharing resources with the tens of thousands of other customers who aren't utilizing the full capacity.

Szpadel• 8 years ago

I think it is more reasonable to compose it from mixture of big to small machines while keeping healthy margin for reserve. It is very much unlikely to get 20 machines above limit and top up all available cores. Also don't forget, that vCPUs most probably don't have any affinity to psychical cores

jaytaylor• 8 years ago

When I first read this headline I had a flashback to the late 90's / early 2000's. It was a time when the term "T3" unambiguously meant only one thing: a blazing fast, very expensive, dedicated network connection!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-carrier

Then a few years later the even fatter optical pipes came along - OC1 and OC3 lines.

My, how times change! ..Well, some things do. If you want a T3 line, they're still available, and today will cost you in the neighborhood of $3,000USD/month (down from $10-15K/month around Y2K).

What a bargain :)

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+does+a+t3+line+cost

newman314• 8 years ago

I had the same exact thought except OC192 popped into my head =)

exikyut2• 8 years ago

Wow, 45-90Mbps for $3k-$6k/mo.

MichaelApproved• 8 years ago

It's not only about the throughput, it's also about the SLA and sustainable throughput.

chillidoor2• 8 years ago

When I started my IT career in South Africa the internet situation was pretty horrendous. ADSL/Broadband speeds were 384kbps and you had hard bandwidth caps of ~$7 per gigabyte of traffic on top of your line rental.

Companies and universities could, however, cough up for expensive alternatives, such as a diginet line which the ISP I worked for at the time offered. These guaranteed uptime (which was very appealing as ADSL outages were very common) but you paid a hell of a lot of money per 64kbps of uncapped bandwidth. You were looking at something like $400-$500 a month per 64k for the cheapest support package. And we weren't even the most expensive. There was a law firm that was paying something like $30k a month for their pimped out 2048kbps line.

Thank God things have improved dramatically there in the last decade (at least in terms of internet speeds).

jedberg2• 8 years ago

Out of curiosity, is there any reason to get a T3 today? I assume anywhere that it is available you can also get DSL for two orders of magnitude less.

patrickg_zill2• 8 years ago

No, unless you want to break it out to a lot of voice lines, 30 T1's to be exact.

Just about anywhere a T3 is you can get ethernet at the same or higher speed for less money.

fovc• 8 years ago

Looking at 1yr reserved fully upfront pricing, the price cuts were ~9% across the board (except 10% for micro and 7% for nano).

This seems like a big improvement for nano, micro, and small which now have 2 vCPUs and the same credits and memory as before.

However, the larger instances are stuck with the same vCPUs and memory, but less than half the CPU credits!

jacob019• 8 years ago

Does 2 vCPUs on the nano get us twice the CPU cycles for multi-threaded workloads?

Regretting my 3-year non-convertible t2.nano reserved instances.

antaviana• 8 years ago

The 9% decrease is only for Linux. For Windows, there is a significant price increase.

For example, for Windows (VPC), a t3.2xlarge reserved for 1 year is a 19.21% more expensive than a t2.2xlarge.

benologist• 8 years ago

AWS nets $20+ million a day in profit so these new machines will probably help us save like Amazon warehouse workers save on toilet breaks by pissing in bottles.

andrewstuart• 8 years ago

So what would be the benefit of running a T3 nano instance over a T2 nano instance? The price is almost the same. Is T3 faster?

jedberg2• 8 years ago

Newer more efficient hardware. Workloads finish faster.

gldalmaso• 8 years ago

You get an extra vCPU for the same memory.

King-Aaron• 8 years ago

Did anyone listen to the 'Amazon Polly' audio that accompanied the article?

I haven't used any of Amazons text-to-speech apps before now, but I found it a little creepy with the way it "inhales" between sentences...

Also, it pronounces "Gigabyte" as "Gibabyte" and "Ji-be-bies" (2:55). This made me giggle.

BeeOnRope2• 8 years ago

Do these instances support AVX-512?

casperb• 8 years ago

Yes, Amazon says so in the linked article

BeeOnRope2• 8 years ago

Thanks, I guess I failed the RTFA test.

I had assumed that this detail is normally hard to dig up, so it is nice to see Amazon being up front and clear about it.

kennydude• 8 years ago

Bursting can cost up to an extra $37.5/month per instance. Bettrer make sure you keep an eye on that CPU usage

blasdel2• 8 years ago

You only start getting billed long after your instance would have been throttled in the Standard model (or if you terminate with a surplus balance)

If your CPUCreditBalance didn't normally get near zero before it's mostly just insurance against grey failures. It also makes the credit model radically easier to reason about.

New T3 Instances – Burstable, Cost-Effective Performance

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