Something we should always remember when considering the implications and hermeneutics of AWS pricing (from Brad Stone's book):<p>Bill Miller, the chief investment officer at Legg Mason Capital Management and a major Amazon shareholder, asked Bezos at the time about the profitability prospects for AWS. Bezos predicted they would be good over the long term but said that he didn’t want to repeat “Steve Jobs’s mistake” of pricing the iPhone in a way that was so fantastically profitable that the smartphone market became a magnet for competition.
I just reserved a series of heavy-utilization m3.xlarge instances for roughly $30k. Apparently, if I had waited a month, I could have saved about $13k because of these price reductions.<p>I can't help but feel that I got really fucked by poor timing that I couldn't control. It would hurt so much less if these price changes were more gradual and somewhat consistent (perhaps monthly).
I see that the prices on the M3 instances dropped a bit more than the prices on the M1 instances did, so they are encouraging us customers even more to move from the older HHD based instances to the newer, faster SSD based instances.
Let us hope that RDS prices also drop as a result of this. It's enough of a value for us at the current price rates to be happy with it, but there will need to be some decrease to make sure that it makes financial sense over straight self-managed EC2.
Any time something is announced for April 1, I always have to take a minute to figure out if it's a joke or not. If I wanted to make a change for my company beginning in April, I think I would announce the planned date as April 2nd just to avoid any confusion.
The most striking thing to me is that they seem to be aggressively motivating people to longer reservations. For RDS they only dropped prices for on-demand (which is still expensive) and 3 year, heavy utilization instances.
Just to make sure I'm reading this right, the upfront reservation fees are higher, but the reserved hourly rates dropped a good bit. It's cheaper over the duration of the reservation, but you owe more of the term upfront.<p>Given this tidbit, might you reserve an instance now, pay the lower fee, but still take advantage of the new hourly rates on April 1? Or are you locked in at whatever rate your reservation is for?
Whoops, sounds like bitter (but still good) news for companies like ours that have million-dollar contracts of reserved instances. If we were to grab our reserved instances right now instead of a few months ago, we'd have saved more than half a million over the next year. Bleh.
Anyone have a sense of how long this price war could feasibly go on? What's happening at the cost side for GOOG / AMZN? How much do you reckon its costs the on the margin for extra cores, memory etc?
I'm very impressed with Amazon's scale and their ability to produce such low prices. Whilst many SaaS vendors (and even traditional brick and mortar business) seemingly keep on increasing prices because of "inflationary" pressures and whatnot... Amazon just keeps on showing - the consumers are being taken for a ride by the rest of the businesses out there.
It's interesting how all of the focus of this discussion is Google, Amazon, and Heroku. Why hasn't RedHat's OpenShift gained more mindshare? It's not a bad platform, although I've found their support leaves something to be desired. It's also priced very competitively for small apps (you get 3 nodes free).
Will there be any change to minimum spot instance pricing?<p>As far as I know this minimum is set by Amazon, but I don't see that pricing listed in the announcement here.
ec2 pricing is just a small piece of the whole bill. but it is great to see the price drops, thanks google!<p>wonder if there would be price battle on bandwidth.
We are in the middle of deracking and throwing out (no kidding) some 3+ year old machines at my work. Care to take a guess at what a 3+ year old machine's specs are? Cause I know you don't have a chance at getting it right.<p>Dell C1100 1U (almost 4 years old)
2x 6core with HT, 24 active threads
144 GB RAM
10x 300 15k SAS<p>I think there are very few use cases where Amazon makes sense. Their VMs are very expensive, and under powered for what you pay.
Last time I priced this out for a personal project it was half the price just to build something at home... if I didn't already own the setup this would be pretty great.
Remember, you get what (the reliability, service) you pay for.<p>And what happens when AWS is no longer a revenue source?<p>Shareholder (owner)'s decision: cut it.