$0.02/hr == approximately $14/mo if you leave it on.<p>Is this really $6/mo cheaper than a linode 512? That might be nice for personal projects.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Is there any reason that wouldn't work? Is this too complicated in practice?
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...<p>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.<p>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.
Here is a Geekbench benchmark report for one of these new micro instances: <a href="http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=287891" rel="nofollow">http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=287891</a> . 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: <a href="http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=241412" rel="nofollow">http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=241412</a> and comparable to a rackspace 4GB server I also benchmarked: <a href="http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=243138" rel="nofollow">http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=243138</a>.
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.<p>Did I give up too soon?
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.
Why is it not possible to get Small Standard instances with 64-bit architectures?<p>This is the only instance that is missing 64-bit.<p>Even Micro instances offer 64-bit.
I put together a google spreadsheet of the EC2 instance pricing. US East / West only, so far.<p><a href="https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AtNTMtkGNKnfdGJoajFpdDNXUUxFX1BOd3Q3bzQ2bEE&hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AtNTMtkGNKnfdGJoajF...</a><p>$10/mo for 1 year reserved is pretty amazing.
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.<p>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 ?
It seems there is no local storage included in the price.<p>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.
The real interest is in seeing what the downstream value added services do with this.<p>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.
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.<p>EDIT: $54 upfront and then $0.01
So how often do EC2 instances go down? Is it at hardware fail rate? or more often? Can I use this as a VPS replacement, and not have to worry about monitoring and fast restoration? (of non-important projects).
I've been using the high-cpu medium instances (c1.medium) for our rails nodes, just to avoid the slothy m1.small CPU. It seems like these are tailor-made for running either haproxy or your web tier!
I notice that, in a sense, AWS proves that the Total Cost of Ownership of Windows infrastructures is higher than the TCO of Linux infrastructures.<p>Amazon charges more for Windows instances across their entire offering. A Windows micro instance costs 50% more than a Linux micro instance ($.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.
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!<p><a href="http://www.jasonrowland.com/2010/09/amazon-vs-rackspace-for-blender/" rel="nofollow">http://www.jasonrowland.com/2010/09/amazon-vs-rackspace-for-...</a>
Can you use Microsoft SQL Server with Micro On-Demand Instances? The pricing doesn't offer a Windows and SQL Server Usage costing.<p><a href="http://aws.amazon.com/windows/" rel="nofollow">http://aws.amazon.com/windows/</a>
It doesn't seem to be up on the pricing page yet (<a href="http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/" rel="nofollow">http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/</a>). Are 32-bit and 64-bit the same price?
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.
Hrm I don't see the option?<p><a href="http://cl.ly/0430c3a3f00c59743368" rel="nofollow">http://cl.ly/0430c3a3f00c59743368</a><p>edit: only appears to be available with certain AMIs
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.<p><a href="http://www.thebitsource.com/featured-posts/rackspace-cloud-servers-versus-amazon-ec2-performance-analysis/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thebitsource.com/featured-posts/rackspace-cloud-s...</a>