Amazon Introduces Bidding For EC2 Compute Time

ryanvm alerts us to Amazon's beta announcement this morning for what it is calling Spot Instances, which represent a name-your-own-price way of using the elastic compute service. Here is Amazon's documentation on the feature. "For customers with flexibility in when their applications can run, Spot Instances can significantly lower their Amazon EC2 costs. Additionally, Spot Instances can provide access to large amounts of additional capacity for applications with urgent needs." Customers can use the EC2 API to see recent spot prices.

Re:Instance creation?

[emcron]

It's not a matter of getting custom quotes -- they just want to know what you're intended use is going to be. The price tiers (I believe) remain the same. It's a basic check to try to limit malicious users who would spawn thousands of instances for spam or other nefarious purposes.

Re:Indictment of cloud computing?

[afidel]

Considering that the 3 year cost of a Double Extra Large Instance 34.2 GB of memory, 13 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform is $36k and that the 3 year TCO for such a machine in my environment today would be about $8k I don't think they are losing money on EC2 unless their utilization is *really* low, but this does allow them to maximize utilization (and profit) as it allows near perfect price discrimination. It also allows them to scale *their* resources for things like cyber monday by bumping these low priority jobs off the cluster and using it to run their own dynamic site.

Re:Indictment of cloud computing?

[Anonymous Coward]

>  They are now a cloud provider that happens to sell stuff (books, etc) on the side.

If I'm reading their SEC filings correctly, 54% of their sales revenue comes from books and movies, 43% from electronics and random crap, and 3% comes from cloud computing.

Looks to me like they're very much still a retailer, albeit one who has started selling off compute capacity.

ELASTIC Compute Cloud

[Slashdot Parent]

3 year TCO for such a machine in my environment today would be about $8k

Ahh, but what would the 1 hour TCO for that machine? And how quickly could you get me 100 of them? And what if after a week, I don't need them anymore. Do I have to continue paying for them?

What if I need 1000? But only for a few days? Can you even fit 1000 in your data center?

EC2 is for elastic computing needs. The price will never compare favorably to static computing on a 3-year basis.

By the way, your 8k is very low compared to what you'd have to pay to get the same featureset of Amazon Web Services. What happens if your data center catches fire? How quickly could you get that machine up and running in a new data center, and at what cost? How quickly could you upgrade the storage? Backup online to fault-tolerant storage? Clone that machine?

What if I want to to load testing of my application? Can you get me a full copy of my production environment and let me quit paying for it once my load testing is done? How much would that cost?

What about staging my application before production deployment? Do I have to pay a full year for a server I plan on using for like 100 hours of that year, tops?

Bottom line: There are a many use cases that call for elastic resources. Comparing EC2 with an ordinary server makes no sense, because they are different tools for different jobs.