Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

ec2instances.info

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 45 posts

Re: Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#12

Post by velodrome »

sitkack wrote: post #9
aristidb wrote: post #3

Am I missing something or does this not include options for the reserved instances? Because _that_ is the part of the EC2 pricing that is most confusing to me.

Reserved instances are most likely for people not like us. You should be modeling your apps to take advantage of spot pricing not reserved.

Is there a reason you specifically want spot pricing over reserved? Do you save more money?

Re: Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#13

Post by semanticist »

I think it's more useful to be able to build up a more real-world deployment with storage costs, etc all built in, like you can do with PlanForCloud.

That gives you a monthly/yearly final number, which is more useful for comparing against other 'cloud' providers, or for making the point that often it's cheaper to use standard VM or dedicated server providers.

This tool is great, but only if you're only looking at EC2, and I think that's a mistake these days.

Re: Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#15

Post by asharp »

stephenr wrote: post #6

I still don’t understand this industry’s obsession with predefined fixed limits on unrelated resources. Just because I want lots of RAM, why do I necessarily need lots of disk and/or lots of transfer? Or vice versa, why do I need to pay for lots of tranfer and RAM to get lots of disk? I get that AWS has separate billing for data, but they still tie CPU, RAM and Disk space together, as do most “traditional” VPS hosts.…

This makes sense when you keep in mind how the older clouds work (essentially VPS providers 101).

You have a server with some disks, some ram and some cpus. You aggregate the disks together, then split them to form the individual disks for the virtual machines. You then use kvm/xen to provide isolation as well as to split the ram/cpu between the virtual machines.

So to answer your question: Storage/ram/cpu is sold in lock step because otherwise there would be resources sitting on servers that are unable to be sold. Bandwidth isn't constrained like that because bandwidth isn't a thing tied to a machine.

There are some providers out there that don't lock ram/disk together. This is mostly because they use a distributed storage pool rather than local disks. This is significantly more complex and is a 'fairly' new addition to the scene (~2010?).

This is also why certain providers still charge you for ram even when your machine is turned off, and why backups/migra tions/plan upgrades can be a bit of a pain in the neck at times.

Re: Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#16

Post by asharp »

elithrar wrote: post #7
stephenr wrote: post #6

I still don’t understand this industry’s obsession with predefined fixed limits on unrelated resources. Just because I want lots of RAM, why do I necessarily need lots of disk and/or lots of transfer? Or vice versa, why do I need to pay for lots of tranfer and RAM to get lots of disk? I get that AWS has separate billing for data, but they still tie CPU, RAM and Disk space together, as do most “traditional” VPS hosts.…

> I still don’t understand this industry’s obsession with predefined fixed limits on unrelated resources. 1. It keeps their billing simpler. They would have to (or otherwise make it up elsewhere) charge different rates for different resources, making it relatively confusing + increasing support costs. 2. Much easier to forecast resources. If you know that you can fit X instances of type Y on a box, or W instances of…

It's more of a capability thing. If you're running, say, Piston cloud you're using ceph over ethernet to back your disks, so you can easily decouple disk usage and ram usage. If you're stuck using local disks (ie. rackspace/joyent/linode/amazon to a point/etc.), then it's a lot harder to provide that sort of product.

That being said there are providers out there that sell it, and have been for years.

Re: Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#17

Post by kpras »

aristidb wrote: post #3

Am I missing something or does this not include options for the reserved instances? Because _that_ is the part of the EC2 pricing that is most confusing to me.

To get an idea of relative savings in reserved instance prices compared to ondemand ones , you can try http://promptcloud.com/ec2-ondemand-vs-reserved-instance-pri... . It was HN couple of months back.

Re: Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#19

Post by okrasz »

semanticist wrote: post #13

I think it's more useful to be able to build up a more real-world deployment with storage costs, etc all built in, like you can do with PlanForCloud. That gives you a monthly/yearly final number, which is more useful for comparing against other 'cloud' providers, or for making the point that often it's cheaper to use standard VM or dedicated server providers. This tool is great, but only if you're only looking at EC2…

Another site that is also helpful to make provider comparisons is http://www.cloudorado.com/
Post reply on HN