Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: AWS EC2 On-demand vs. Reserved Interactive Price Comparison

promptcloud.com

21–30 of 39 posts

Re: Show HN: AWS EC2 On-demand vs. Reserved Interactive Price Comparison

#24
post #6

This is simple but excellent. AWS should have graphs like that on their calculator page to help people decide how long it will take for their investment in a reserved instance to get ahead of on-demand (or another reserved instance plan).

Perhaps it's pessimistic of me to say so, but I doubt Amazon wants you to be able to appreciate the price relationship with quite this degree of immediacy. Sure, the data is there for you to plot yourself or use a third-party tool such as the OP's. But if you naively select an on-demand instance (the default) where a dedicated instance would be more advantageous for you, Mr. Bezos is made a tiny bit happier.

Re: Show HN: AWS EC2 On-demand vs. Reserved Interactive Price Comparison

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that what I'm saying? That the cost should increase, albeit at a much more gradual rate, from the start of the term to the end?

Heavy utilization reservation is different. See this page http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/InstanceS... Quote from the page above " Light and Medium Utilization Reserved Instances also are billed by the instance-hour for the time that instances are in a running state; if you do not run the instance in an hour, there is zero usage charge. Partial instance-hours consumed are billed as full hours. Heav…

Wow, that certainly is surprising. I've looked at the EC2 pricing page many times and never noticed that.

I think you pasted the wrong link, though. Here's the page which contains that quote: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/#reserved

Re: Show HN: AWS EC2 On-demand vs. Reserved Interactive Price Comparison

#26

The sliders dont work on mobile.

Which browser are you using ? we tested on quite a few combinations but might have missed some.

fails for me with android chrome beta 28.0.1500.21 on android 4.2.2

Re: Show HN: AWS EC2 On-demand vs. Reserved Interactive Price Comparison

#27
post #24
post #6

This is simple but excellent. AWS should have graphs like that on their calculator page to help people decide how long it will take for their investment in a reserved instance to get ahead of on-demand (or another reserved instance plan).

Perhaps it's pessimistic of me to say so, but I doubt Amazon wants you to be able to appreciate the price relationship with quite this degree of immediacy. Sure, the data is there for you to plot yourself or use a third-party tool such as the OP's. But if you naively select an on-demand instance (the default) where a dedicated instance would be more advantageous for you, Mr. Bezos is made a tiny bit happier.

Maybe, but the heavy reserved instances come with a required hourly commitment. If you buy one, you have to pay the 24/7 hourly usage fee regardless of whether you're actually running a server. That strikes me as the bigger "gotcha."

Re: Show HN: AWS EC2 On-demand vs. Reserved Interactive Price Comparison

#28

I'm not sure how these calculations are correct - I have eu-west-1 set up, and the price for 1yr heavy reserved is fixed. But the AWS pricing still has an hourly rate against it. The final cost looks right, but the initial cost (eg., taking out the reservation but never running the instance) should just be the setup cost I think?

maybe he/she was assuming if you are going for heavy reservation you will be using 100% of hours? the other reserved instance pricing changes with hours havent done a check to see if he was taking into account the discounted hourly price or just adding on on-demand hours...

Unfortunately, it's not an assumption. It's not immediately clear when looking at the pricing, but if you buy a heavy reserved instance you have to pay the 24/7/365 hourly rate. It's something for startups to consider as they look at their burn rate.

Re: Show HN: AWS EC2 On-demand vs. Reserved Interactive Price Comparison

#30

If you're taking feature requests, it'd be really handy to see pricing breakdowns for Windows instances as well. They have a different breakeven point than the Linux ones.

Sure, will add it in a couple of days. Wanted to get feedback from the community before adding more use cases.
Post reply on HN