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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

#41

Post by mbesto »

zedpm wrote: post #4

That's sure nice, but I'm waiting for AWS to switch to automatic sustained use discounts [0] like GCP offers. [0]: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/sustained-use-discount...

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.

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#42

Post by YokoZar »

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.

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#43

Post by doh »

williamstein wrote: post #40
doh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure that will happen anytime soon. It's the same with Local SSD. The virtualization of this environment is very challenging, maybe beyond a point where it makes sense for them to do so.

But GCE already has local SSD’s for preempt instances, and they even cost less.

Wasn't aware they added the support. Well, maybe they can figure out GPUs too.

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#44

Post by SadWebDeveloper »

scaryclam wrote: post #17
SadWebDeveloper wrote: post #15

Serverless advocates/engies are probably the only people celebrating this, everyone else keeps waiting for self renew instance reservation... last time i forgot about them it was too late.

The market for this is much broader. We do a bunch of data science so spinning up a heavy machine and only getting billed for the 5 minutes usage is a massive saving for us. I'm quite excited by this news!

That is basically the serverless main "point of sell" you are just one step away from automation (if you aren't already doing it) and it will be virtually the same as serverless

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#45

Post by icebraining »

andrewstuart wrote: post #25
jawns wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you're describing AWS Lambda / serverless architecture. But maybe I'm not understanding your use case?

There are a wide range of tiny operating systems that can boot in a matter of milliseconds. The applications are "whatever you want imagine" but yes one application is building FAAS Function As A Service in which the operating system carries out a single function. Put anther way, Docker is complex, overweight, and requires re-implementation of much computing infrastructure. You can meet many of the same goals as Dock…

Docker is just a manager of Linux namespaces. You'll need one to manage your operating systems anyway - start/stop them, copy them to the machine, delete them, etc.

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#46

Post by jeffmcjunkin »

doh wrote: post #43
williamstein wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But GCE already has local SSD’s for preempt instances, and they even cost less.

Wasn't aware they added the support. Well, maybe they can figure out GPUs too.

I'd be surprised if it'd be that much additional work, if the local SSD options are NVMe -- which is also PCI-e like GPU's.

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#47

Post by xref »

prohor wrote: post #24
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.

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

that's a very handy site, previously I had mostly been using http://www.ec2instances.info/ and http://www.gceinstances.info/

Thanks for pointing it out!

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#48

Post by movedx »

lostapathy wrote: post #33

This should enable some entirely new use cases, especially around CI and automation in general. Per-second billing greatly reduces the overhead to bringing up an instance for a short task then killing it immediately - so I can do that. There's no need to build a buffer layer to add workers to a pool and leave them in the pool, so that you didn't end up paying for 30 hours of instance time to run 30, two-minute tasks…

For us it will mean we can spin down Bamboo elastic agents much quicker and save money.

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#49

Post by mritun »

andrewstuart wrote: post #25
jawns wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you're describing AWS Lambda / serverless architecture. But maybe I'm not understanding your use case?

There are a wide range of tiny operating systems that can boot in a matter of milliseconds. The applications are "whatever you want imagine" but yes one application is building FAAS Function As A Service in which the operating system carries out a single function. Put anther way, Docker is complex, overweight, and requires re-implementation of much computing infrastructure. You can meet many of the same goals as Dock…

OS does not serve requests -- applications do. While it may be possible to demo a toy OS+app, real-world applications take seconds if not minutes to start and warm up. Throughput on a cold-cache is a fraction of that on a warm cache.

Starting in milli-seconds is not the hard problem. Starting + warming caches in that time is -- that will get you a bunch of awards when you solve it.

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#50

Post by user5994461 »

mbesto wrote: post #41
zedpm wrote: post #4

That's sure nice, but I'm waiting for AWS to switch to automatic sustained use discounts [0] like GCP offers. [0]: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/sustained-use-discount...

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.
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