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AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

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Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#141

Post by vidarh »

vacri wrote: post #72
prohor wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed - just check cloud comparison, AWS is rarely at the top: https://www.cloudorado.com/cloud_server_comparison.jsp

Well, if you're going to use bad figures, then sure, AWS won't win. The default size there is 768MB RAM, 1 cpu, and 50GB disk... which it says AWS will provide for $54. Whereas in actuality a t2.micro with those specs only costs $14, lower than all the listed prices (which are all clearly out of date) Not to mention all the big names missing from that list. For some reason Dimension Data makes the list (and it's woef…

As per my other reply: A t2.micro does not allow you to use more than 10% of the vCPU on a sustained basis. Any use over that needs to be earned, and you only earn 6 credits (for one minute each) per hour.

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#142

Post by vidarh »

andrewstuart wrote: post #27
vidarh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're concerned about cost, AWS is almost never the right place to host to begin with.

You miss the point. The lifetime of a web request, for example, can be measured in milliseconds. It is now possible, technically anyway, for operating systems to boot, service the request and disappear. There needs to be pricing models that reflect computing models like this.

And that's great. But it's meaningless when the base-cost per unit of computation capacity is so high that it is in most cases cheaper to have a whole farm of servers running idle elsewhere.

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#143

Post by matwood »

YokoZar wrote: post #42

I once considered writing an EC2 autoscaler that knew the exact timestamps of the instances so that it could avoid shutting down VMs that still had 59 minutes of "free" time left because they'd been up across another hour-long threshold. That sort of nonsense logic shouldn't be useful, but Amazon was giving a huge economic incentive for it. This is certainly a long time coming.

> I once considered writing an EC2 autoscaler that knew the exact timestamps of the instances so that it could avoid shutting down VMs that still had 59 minutes of "free" time left because they'd been up across another hour-long threshold.

Years ago my boss at the time did this (this was when scaling had to mostly be done in code/by hand). I just recently updated all the code as I moved it to using spots. The low price of spots made it less important to shut ones down closer to the hour mark though.

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#144

Post by userpass »

vacri wrote: post #66
YokoZar wrote: post #42

I once considered writing an EC2 autoscaler that knew the exact timestamps of the instances so that it could avoid shutting down VMs that still had 59 minutes of "free" time left because they'd been up across another hour-long threshold. That sort of nonsense logic shouldn't be useful, but Amazon was giving a huge economic incentive for it. This is certainly a long time coming.

Remember that AWS has been in the game for over a decade. Per-hour billing was amazing when it came in. Also, is the economic incentive really that huge? Or is it just a nicety?

When you want to run a task for 3 minutes with 40 cores then paying a minimum of 10 minutes or 60 minutes can make the entire idea unprofitable.

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#145

Post by userpass »

andrewstuart wrote: post #27
vidarh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're concerned about cost, AWS is almost never the right place to host to begin with.

You miss the point. The lifetime of a web request, for example, can be measured in milliseconds. It is now possible, technically anyway, for operating systems to boot, service the request and disappear. There needs to be pricing models that reflect computing models like this.

You still want your webserver to run for at least a minute to take advantage of concurrency otherwise you are not getting ahead of AWS lambda. If you have one pending request with 100ms latency then it will also take 100ms even if you have 1000 pending requests assuming that you are not CPU bound. You only pay for 100ms + 200ms start time. If you instead start an OS for every request you would have to pay the 100ms + 200ms multiplied by 1000 (the number of requests). In total you'd have to pay 300 seconds worth of CPU time.

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#146

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

cjsuk wrote: post #137
colde wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you looked at https://amazonlightsail.com/ as a way to make get a billing system similar to Linode?

As someone who has used both and DigitalOcean, Lightsail performance is absolutely terrible compared to the above. It feels like you have perpetually run out of CPU credits.

Lightsail is just renamed t2 instances with storage and bandwidth bundled in. Also, last time I checked (which, granted, was the week Lightsail came out), you can't even check your CPU credit balance on a Lightsail instance. You also can't attach an EIP to a Lightsail instance.

Lightsail is dumbed down to the point of basically being worthless. There's really no reason to use Lightsail over Digital Ocean.

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#147

Post by extra88 »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #146
cjsuk wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has used both and DigitalOcean, Lightsail performance is absolutely terrible compared to the above. It feels like you have perpetually run out of CPU credits.

Lightsail is just renamed t2 instances with storage and bandwidth bundled in. Also, last time I checked (which, granted, was the week Lightsail came out), you can't even check your CPU credit balance on a Lightsail instance. You also can't attach an EIP to a Lightsail instance. Lightsail is dumbed down to the point of basically being worthless. There's really no reason to use Lightsail over Digital Ocean.

Lightsail is a baby step into the AWS environment. Once you're in the AWS console and Amazon has your credit card number, a psychological barrier has been breached, making it much easier to start experimenting with their other offerings.

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#148

Post by extra88 »

sarabande wrote: post #119
deafcalculus wrote: post #118

I really wish AWS would allow users to cap billing. Something that freezes all AWS services if the monthly bill exceeds X would make me a lot more comfortable when experimenting with AWS.

Agreed. Right now you can set billing alarms, but not actually freeze billing. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/...

Looking at the CloudWatch console, I see I can also add AutoScaling and EC2 actions that are triggered by an alarm. That still leaves open other risks like a bandwidth bill for S3 hosted content.

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#149

Post by giorgiosironi »

user5994461 wrote: post #50
mbesto wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would legitimately lose a lot of money if they did this now (and I would argue, wouldn't make up for it in market share). Most companies I work with who switch to AWS think it's a 1:1 conversion in terms of cost from a data center and pretty much just "leave AWS on" not realizing that they are not only paying for computing cost but the hidden cost of being able to scale up more instances quickly.

It's really really difficult to be able to turn on and off instances as needed, like turn a test instance on in the morning when developers come in and turn it off in the evening when they leave.

I do this with Python+Boto+Jenkins: https://giorgiosironi.github.io/talks/ec2_ci/slides/ Until now we were turning off at the end of the hour (e.g. 2:55:00, 3:55:00) but now we have to change the model a bit.
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