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Amazon Starts Charging For Cloud Computing Resources By the Second (amazon.com)
AmiMoJo writes:
"Back in the old days, you needed to buy or lease a server if you needed access to compute power," remembers Amazon's AWS blog. "When Amazon launched EC2 back in 2006, the ability to use an instance for an hour, and to pay only for that hour, was big news. The pay-as-you-go model inspired our customers to think about new ways to develop, test, and run applications of all types."
But now from the 2nd of October, Amazon will start billing Linux virtual machines by the second, with a one minute minimum.
But now from the 2nd of October, Amazon will start billing Linux virtual machines by the second, with a one minute minimum.
"After observing your usage statistics, an hour is way too long. I am now charging by the second, one minute minimum."
That's what she said!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I wonder what the net effect will be on the cost to users? Will it reduce costs or, ultimately, raise them? Perhaps, this is explained in the article...guess I should read it.
I no longer need to buy expensive machines when I need to break just one key or find the clear text for a singe hash!
I always wanted to steal identities, but the large up-front costs always made me shy away from it. But no more!
Thank you, Amazon!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There's a small but (until now) growing cottage industry that has helped heavy users of AWS get compute time very, very cheaply. Basically, if you can divide a huge compute job up into a large number of short, nearly stateless jobs, then you can launch a bunch of nodes, run them for less than fifteen minutes each, terminate them after the jobs run, and not have to pay for CPU time. This new move by Amazon puts that to an end.
Remember when 6 minute billing was all the rage?
Back in the old days, you needed to buy or lease a server if you needed access to compute power," remembers Amazon's AWS blog.
Someone didn't learn History, again.
In the 1960s, [...] users were charged rent for the terminal, a charge for hours of connect time, a charge for seconds of CPU time, and a charge for kilobyte-months of disk storage.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
You might be better off with DreamHost.
I already have a backend that spins up extra instances when necessary.
It does not happen often, a few times a day
but it is usually only needed for 5 to 15 minutes
The Cloud Is A TRAP!
All you dumb asses still haven't figured it out.
Is it now trendy to accuse numerous posters of being creimer the way it used to be trendy to accuse numerous posters of being twitter?
I have not used my AWS account in a month. Originally I set it up for testing Windows Server 2012r2 and had set up Directory Services. Well guess what, even though I had ZERO instances running but the Directory Service AD had been created (unused this whole time) I now have a bill for $140. WTF?! So does Amazon expect me to delete my Directory Services domain each day so that I will not incur charges? How can they not see that it was not being used. I know I know, my fault for not reading the fine print but this is just shady.
"Back in the old days, you needed to buy or lease a server if you needed access to compute power,"
Wrong, back in the old days there was timesharing, and before that there was batch processing.
Timesharing was basically a shell account on a shared server where you could run stuff while other users ran their stuff. There were many huge timesharing services like CompuServe.
Batch processing meant you'd put your task into a queue, and when its turn came, it got 100% of the cpu until it finished (typically some seconds or minutes), and then the next person's task would run. That is still used internally at places like Google, for map-reduce jobs that run on 1000s of cpus. Someone told me the average length of one of those tasks is about 20 minutes. They keep those cpus running at basically 100% utilization 24/7 with those workloads.
This is great for my workload, which looks a lot like "spin a large cluster up, slam it for about 20 minutes, then shut it down". Since the previous minimum was 1 hour, I foresee massive drops in our on-demand costs. It also means that the complicated scheduler we were considering, which was going to be optimized for keeping machines loaded until they were x hours and 58 minutes old, can be tossed out. Seriously, thanks Amazon!
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
AWS always did accounting by the second, but the minimum charge was by the hour.
This makes AWS cheaper for those who are doing smaller workloads.
This is great news IMHO.
Up until now if you wanted to get your money's worth you needed your EC2 workloads to work efficiently with an EC2 Instance Hour. As soon as the hour begins you were paying for the whole thing. So you have to organise your scaling policies, batch processing and anything else around making sure that your EC2 instance is doing something useful for the whole hour.
This is going to reduce effort of cost minimisation, with the immediate impact being cheaper bills for heavy and varied EC2 users.
used to use this EXACT same method?