Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

Here's a suggestion for a big improvement: Pick apart the EC2 pricing page ( http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ ) and find the URLs to the JSON (e.g. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ri-light-linux.json ) and build something that's totally dynamic.

Although the URLs and the formats aren't an official AWS API, I think it is pretty safe to count on them for an application like this.

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#6

Post by dcurtis » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 4:17 AM UTC

This is awesome.

I was starting some instances this morning, and it's shocking how poorly Amazon describes what they offer. I had three browser windows and a calculator open just to figure out which instances are being offered, and at which relative prices. You'd think they would spend more time on this stuff.

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#7

Post by jtchang » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 4:18 AM UTC

I always tell people that EC2 generally costs more than a VPS. They don't believe me until they actually do the calculation. You have to factor in things like bandwidth and storage as well (which is usually included for services like linode or slicehost).

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#8

Post by wes-exp » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 4:22 AM UTC

ben1040 wrote: post #2

Nice. Would be extra useful to see reserved instance pricing on here too.

This. I would like to see the amortized costs of running reserved instances 24/7 for their full reservation period.

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#9

Post by zhoutong » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 4:22 AM UTC

jtchang wrote: post #7

I always tell people that EC2 generally costs more than a VPS. They don't believe me until they actually do the calculation. You have to factor in things like bandwidth and storage as well (which is usually included for services like linode or slicehost).

Also have to consider the inferior CPU performance:

1 ECU is equivalent to 1.0 GHz - 1.2 GHz Xeon CPU in 2007. And the number of cores is usually small.

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#10

Post by bobbles » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 4:23 AM UTC

Is there any information available about how popular each of these configurations is? (do they release that kind of info?)