Does anyone know if these pricing changes are retroactive for customers that have already purchased the reserved instances?
Not usually.
It's pretty much Caveat emptor with them.
Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014
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Re: Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014
#92I just reserved a series of heavy-utilization m3.xlarge instances for roughly $30k. Apparently, if I had waited a month, I could have saved about $13k because of these price reductions. I can't help but feel that I got really fucked by poor timing that I couldn't control. It would hurt so much less if these price changes were more gradual and somewhat consistent (perhaps monthly).
It's worth calling and talking to your sales rep about this. I've found AWS to be surprisingly accommodating with pricing.
I accidentally ran a spot instance for $70 an hour for two hours due to my less-then-smart configuration. They refunded me.
:)
Re: Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014
#93Just out of curiosity, why would one choose AWS over Digital Ocean? Isn't DO considerably cheaper?
The EC2 C3 instance type is going to be about the same price as DO for 1 year reserve and less than DO for 3 year. Spot pricing will also be lower than DO for C3s. On top of that EC2 is far superior to DO in many ways: EBS off instance storage (DO is local storage only), volume snapshots, IPv6, load balancing, private IPs, multiple IPv4 addresses, 8 data centers globally, firewalls, VPN, VPC, PCI DSS compliance, companion services like S3/CloudFront/Route 53 and much higher default quotas just to mention a few. DO is essentially a VPS with utility pricing.
Re: Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's worth calling and talking to your sales rep about this. I've found AWS to be surprisingly accommodating with pricing.
I accidentally ran a spot instance for $70 an hour for two hours due to my less-then-smart configuration. They refunded me. :)
That says a lot for their customer service. I know a lot of companies that would have had more of a "you break it, you buy it" style attitude. Good on them!
Re: Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014
#95Whoops, sounds like bitter (but still good) news for companies like ours that have million-dollar contracts of reserved instances. If we were to grab our reserved instances right now instead of a few months ago, we'd have saved more than half a million over the next year. Bleh.
There are a bunch of calculators to compare reserved vs. on demand pricing, but it just occurred to me that they should really be comparing reserved vs. predicted on demand pricing, taking into account inevitable future price drops. Instead of locking in savings, reserved instances are really locking in today's high prices.
Re: Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014
#96Earlier 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.
I tried to give away a heavy instance in the past but to sell on the Reserved Instance marketplace you must have a US bank account. Worth noting if you are considering heavy instances and are based outside the US. You will be stuck with them for the life of the reservation term.
Re: Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014
#97Whoops, sounds like bitter (but still good) news for companies like ours that have million-dollar contracts of reserved instances. If we were to grab our reserved instances right now instead of a few months ago, we'd have saved more than half a million over the next year. Bleh.
There are a bunch of calculators to compare reserved vs. on demand pricing, but it just occurred to me that they should really be comparing reserved vs. predicted on demand pricing, taking into account inevitable future price drops. Instead of locking in savings, reserved instances are really locking in today's high prices.
The trouble I'm in is that I have to buy RIs for a particular workload to ensure that the instances are there when I need them (and so I don't get "Sorry, we're full" error).
Re: Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The private git repos rolled out a while ago. https://source.developers.google.com/p/PROJECT/r/default You might have to turn it on in your developer console, not sure. At the moment, pushing to its "master" branch tries to deploy to app engine, so that might not be what you're looking for. You can clone it (and, in the future, your connected repos and other Google-hosted repos) with 'gcloud init PROJECT', and things…
Thanks! I searched but couldn't find this yesterday.
Re: Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014
#99ec2 pricing is just a small piece of the whole bill. but it is great to see the price drops, thanks google! wonder if there would be price battle on bandwidth.
There seems to be price reductions everywhere (RDS, S3, etc.)
Re: Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014
#100how are they still making profits ?
Hardware cost has come down significantly since the prices were last changed. They are making a lot more money now than they will be on April 1st, but it looks like they'll still be in the black.