Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014 • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#41

Post by mikebabineau » Wed, Mar 26, 2014, 7:34 PM UTC

scott_w wrote: post #28

atonse wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly - how can I run a database server without EBS?

We use RDS (they now support Postgres) and Elasticache. The pricing seems reasonable for the performance (I've not done benchmarks if I'm being honest), and you get to treat all your EC2 instances as expendable.

If you're eschewing EBS because of past problems (like the Oct 2012 outage), you should be aware that RDS is EBS-backed [1].

Also, on EC2, EBS-backed instances boot faster [2]. Of course, you can (and should) still treat EBS-backed instances as expendable.

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/rds/faqs/#hardware-scaling

[2] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/Component...

Re: Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#42

Post by grosskur » Wed, Mar 26, 2014, 7:36 PM UTC

atonse wrote: post #22

copergi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you even do anything without using EBS?

Exactly - how can I run a database server without EBS?

Run multiple replicas with synchronous replication. For Postgres see:

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Synchronous_replication

This way you should be able to tolerate failure of a single instance without losing data.

Re: Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#43

Post by copergi » Wed, Mar 26, 2014, 7:36 PM UTC

scott_w wrote: post #28

atonse wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly - how can I run a database server without EBS?

We use RDS (they now support Postgres) and Elasticache. The pricing seems reasonable for the performance (I've not done benchmarks if I'm being honest), and you get to treat all your EC2 instances as expendable.

As others pointed out, you use EBS then.

Re: Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#44

Post by mpg33 » Wed, Mar 26, 2014, 7:37 PM UTC

NathanKP wrote: post #13

I see that the prices on the M3 instances dropped a bit more than the prices on the M1 instances did, so they are encouraging us customers even more to move from the older HHD based instances to the newer, faster SSD based instances.

M1 is older hard drives and M3 is SSD? Didn't know that

Re: Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#45

Post by nirvdrum » Wed, Mar 26, 2014, 7:41 PM UTC

gtaylor wrote: post #39

nirvdrum wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're locked into whatever rate your reservation is for. This is why you see rate fluctuations on the marketplace for the same instance type. It's also why a 3 year reservation may not make sense.

That makes sense, thanks for the clarification. Bummer, though. We just reserved a multi-AZ m3.large RDS instance last week. I wish AWS would take up Google's system of graduated price reductions over steady run duration.

The other fun tidbit is on heavy reservations you pay per-hour even if you're not using the machine. That's not the case for the light or medium. So keep that in mind when planning out your reservations.

When we switched off EC2 it was financially advantageous to basically give away our heavy instances on the marketplace just to shed the liability.

Re: Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#46

Post by rmcpherson » Wed, Mar 26, 2014, 7:45 PM UTC

Will there be any change to minimum spot instance pricing?

As far as I know this minimum is set by Amazon, but I don't see that pricing listed in the announcement here.

Re: Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#47

Post by mikebabineau » Wed, Mar 26, 2014, 7:46 PM UTC

rpedela wrote: post #15

grosbisou wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with EBS? And for what usage?

Most of AWS's major outages have been related to EBS. Although outages can happen to any hosting provider, and I am sure they have fixed the previous issues. So EBS should get more stable over time and it is already quite stable. The performance of EBS is pretty bad, and getting decent performance is expensive. Having said that, if your application runs in memory and disk usage is infrequent then it is probably fine…

From what I've seen/heard/experienced, Provisioned IOPS largely addressed the issues with inconsistent performance.

Re: Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#48

Post by dataminded » Wed, Mar 26, 2014, 7:47 PM UTC

j-rom wrote: post #3

Just out of curiosity, why would one choose AWS over Digital Ocean? Isn't DO considerably cheaper?

DO is great for hacking on personal projects.

I prefer AWS for work stuff because firewall, security groups and networking are much easier to manage.

I have not yet tried GCE but I may move some of my dev stuff over once they roll out the private git repos.

Re: Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#49

Post by joevandyk » Wed, Mar 26, 2014, 7:48 PM UTC

grosskur wrote: post #42

atonse wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly - how can I run a database server without EBS?

Run multiple replicas with synchronous replication. For Postgres see: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Synchronous_replication This way you should be able to tolerate failure of a single instance without losing data.

we do async replication with good monitoring of the slaves to make sure the slaves don't get too far behind. couple that with wal-e.

of course, if a comet hits the master db server, you might lose a tiny bit data (typically 0.1 seconds) if not using sync replication.

you can use sync replication for the important things that you absolutely can't lose, and async replication for everything else.

Re: Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#50

Post by gtaylor » Wed, Mar 26, 2014, 7:49 PM UTC

nirvdrum wrote: post #45

gtaylor wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense, thanks for the clarification. Bummer, though. We just reserved a multi-AZ m3.large RDS instance last week. I wish AWS would take up Google's system of graduated price reductions over steady run duration.

The other fun tidbit is on heavy reservations you pay per-hour even if you're not using the machine. That's not the case for the light or medium. So keep that in mind when planning out your reservations. When we switched off EC2 it was financially advantageous to basically give away our heavy instances on the marketplace just to shed the liability.

After this latest round of price cuts, I'm starting to question whether I even want to reserve instances on the lower end. An m3.medium is about $52/month on demand vs $35/month (amortized over 12 months with a 1-year heavy usage reservation).

In this example, it becomes a question of whether it's worth saving $130'ish a year for the liability that a 1-year m3.medium heavy util reservation represents. At the lower end, that's not a huge amount of liability, but it may be a case where I just don't bother reserving m3.mediums anymore because it's a wash.