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

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

#31
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

There is one more "gotcha" if you dig deeper. That is the drop in EC2 prices and Amazon in general has been vague about passing on the benefits of price drop to old reservations ( https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=325153 ) . We even thought about adding speculative price drop and then do the comparison, but dropped the idea. It will be interesting to hear the take of HN community on this ..

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

#33

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.

I second the request for Windows instances. I currently use a spreadsheet to track everything, then update the costs every few months--comparing instance sizes with OS's. It seems like something Amazon should offer themselves, but I'm glad you're taking on the challenge. :)

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

#35
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.

Amazon actually regularly sends you e-mails letting you know if your configuration can be optimized to reduce it's price by moving to reserved instances. This suggests to me that they favor the reduced revenue but predictable capacity planning of reduced instances.

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

#38
That very cool, something that many of us will find useful.

Feedback: The top bar folds over when the browser window is resized (looks like anything less than 1024 px). The page then starts to overlap on itself blocking out content at the top.

How did you code up the graphing part? HTML5?

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

#39

For 30 days 24hr scenario, "Total cost of instance" graph is showing bogus numbers on the iPad. Let me know if you are unable to replicate and need a screenshot.

Yes that will be good, please send the screenshot to info "ta" promptcloud.com

Done.
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