Posted by SeanBannister on September 11, 2010 at 2:44am
This is pretty exciting Amazon has announced a Micro Instance for only $0.02 an hour with 613mb RAM and up to 2 EC2 Compute Units. I know a lot of people were using other cloud computing providers due to the lower price point so this potentially opens Amazon up to a much larger market.
Only problem is I just tried to launch a Pantheon instance on it and realised the new instance size requires an EBS Bootable instance.
Comments
How much does this end up costing monthly?
Just curious, and is it comparable to Linode's pricing or is it just a different ballgame?
Comparing these services is
Comparing these services is hard because there's just so much to compare. The hardest thing to compare is CPU and disk I/O you'd really have to benchmark your application to find out how they both stack up.
On the surface Linode appears to be cheaper but they only provide defined storage and data transfer amounts whereas with Amazon you only pay for what you use so depending on your usage Amazon could be cheaper. I don't have any experience with Linode but I presume they don't provide all the nice features that Amazon provides either, Amazon really can't be beat when it comes down to flexibility.
Accumalation of costs on Amazon
Was looking at Amazon yesterday and today.
There is a cost for:
Micro Instances:
Instances of this family provide a small amount of consistent CPU resources and allow you to burst CPU capacity when additional cycles are available. They are well suited for lower throughput applications and web sites that consume significant compute cycles periodically.
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing
And, found the article by Khalid to be interesting regarding Amazon performance.
http://2bits.com/drupal-performance/drupal-on-a-dedicated-servers-vs-ama...
Game changer for smaller sites
I think the micro instance is a game changer.
Up until its introduction, Amazon has been expensive with no guarantee of performance to match the cost.
The micro instance directly challenges the likes of Slicehost and Linode and others who have small VPSs, and the price point is very appealing for small sites.
With some storage factored in, the cost is around $30 or less a month, and that is really good for small sites. Rough breakdown: CPU -> $14.64, EBS I/O requests -> 13.00 (assuming an arbitrary 50 IOPS. 10GB EBS -> $1, with 0.5GB snapshots. Total is $28.72.
Compare to the so far excellent Slicehost at $38 for 512MB VPS (flat fee, no cost for I/O).
Before you jump to Amazon, do the math here http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html. It is a bit tedious, but you need to factor in everything
The above article was written before the micro instance was introduced, and still that instance type would not apply to medium and large sites where Amazon is expensive and underperforming in most cases.
Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc..
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com.
Pricewise, they don't quite
Pricewise, they don't quite beat Linode at $19.95 a month for a Xen 512MB instance with 16GB storage, 200GB transfer bandwidth, and 4 virtual CPU cores on an 8 core machine. Linode also gives a 10-15% discount for 12-24 month prepayment.
If what this guy says is
If what this guy says is true:
http://huanliu.wordpress.com/2010/09/10/amazon-ec2-micro-instances-deepe...
then CPU use can be very limited at times. Possibly at the wrong times.
Sounds like it might be fine for a Boost powered, mostly-cached anonymous user site, where you're serving static files most of the time, but if you have significant logged in users, you might push up against the CPU throttler. Fine for a load balancer or DNS server, but not good if you expect to be using PHP all that much or anything else that can be CPU-intensive.
micro performance is very poor
What we have heard so far is that the micro instances do not provide you with a lot of performance. We'll try to put some case studies up.
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I'd be really interested to
I'd be really interested to see how they benchmark with Pantheon.