Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
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.
They're claiming it'll reduce them, but I suspect it's more nuanced than that. If you've been chopping your work up into smaller enough slices to qualified for free usage (15 minutes or less?) then it's absolutely going to cost you more, because that option seems to be going away. For everyone else though, I guess the de-facto subsidies of those in the former category are going to be coming off your bottom line, so yeah, there's probably going to a reduction for you.
You can bet that Amazon has crunched the numbers and the net overall revenue from EC2 will be going up though.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Not true, it depends on how they adjust the rates they charge per timeslot vs. how many people were getting in under that 15 minute (or whatever it is) free window. If you are now going to be paying a total of $1/s for your EC2 server farm, then the breakeven point would be at $3,600/hour for that same server farm - if you're previous bill was more than $3,600/hour - including any dead time - then you are going to see a reduction in total costs. If you are in the situation where time is money and you are deliberately chopping up a task into a lot of parallel tasks so it finsishes faster and swallowing the resultant expense of having multiple servers sitting idle when the job completes, then the savings could add up pretty fast. The potential win for Amazon comes from all those who were previously getting free minutes through massive parallelisation to get under the free usage bar; that previously written off revenue is now going to be billed, and if Amazon has done their homework almost certainly will exceed the savings made by those in the former group.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Disclaimer: I work for AWS, but I'm speaking personally here.
This will always be cheaper for on-demand users. Previously, you were charged a full hour for any fractional usage. As soon as you start an instance, you're being billed -- even a start and stop a second later counted as 1 hour. (There is a free tier: you get 750 hours/month of t2.micro usage on Linux, RHEL, SLES, or Windows, during the first 12 months.)
Let's say you had a batch job that ran for 12 minutes, 4x/day, on Amazon Linux on a c4.large instance in the Oregon region ($0.100/instance-hour). Before this change, you would have paid $12.20/month (4 instance-hours/day x 30.5 days/month x $0.100/instance-hour). Starting October 2, you will pay $2.44/month (0.8 instance-hours/day x 30.5 days/month x $0.100/instance-hour).
AWS believes that cloud computing is going to be a high volume, relatively low margin business, and Amazon is very comfortable with these types of businesses. AWS has had (as of this writing) 62 price reductions in the last 9 years, largely in the absence of any competitive pressure. (And, since I pay for my personal usage -- no, we don't get a free lunch here! -- that's kept me happy as a customer.) Internally, it's a relentlessly customer-obsessed culture -- you can (and I have!) stopped a VP mid-speech by saying, "Wait, I don't think that's the right thing for the customer!" (We're also a very data-driven culture, so you're expected to have data to support this, of course. :-) )
Hope this helps clear up some of the confusion. Note that there are some cases where billing will continue to be per-hour (or fraction thereof), such as marketplace usage -- Jeff Barr's blog post has all the details.