New Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances

The good folks at Amazon have announced a new pricing scheme called a Reserved Instance to complement the On Demand instance. For a low one time payment, and about 20% of the instance hour cost, you can reserve capacity on 1 or 3 year terms. If you want to tie yourself into a long term contract but have a significantly reduced rate resulting in savings, this is the option for you.

For a standard instance, on a per use basis you will pay approximately $880 for one year. Using the new reserved instance, you will pay about $580 for a savings of around $300. These are just rough estimates, but a reserved instance saves you around 30-50% versus On Demand instances.  The longer the term, the better your savings.  You will save $1300 on a 3 year term deal against an on demand instance running for 3 years straight.
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Costs Using Amazon EC2 & S3

Figuring out all the costs when hosting on EC2 using S3 storage can be tricky. This is break down of what you can approximately expect to pay using a few basic scenarios, such as a lamp server and S3 backups, with Amazon services. This will also compare the costs to what you would expect to pay if you want to do the hosting yourself.

To fully understand EC2 charges, you need to know the difference between the instance types and what they cost to best meet your requirements. For the purpose of this post I will summarize – I have converted the Amazon Compute Units into basic CPU power and will then detail the costs based upon each of these instances.
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Amazon Launches EC2 Web-based Console

Finally Amazon has released a web-based console to manage your EC2 instances. This should make life much easier for those who have not found the other great tools and services for EC2 management such as Scalr and Elasticfox. The information here is a summary of this post on Cnet. Amazon’s interface will allow for the following:

1. AMI management: browse and search (Amazon Machine Images), launch instances from AMIs, deregister and register AMIs
2. Instance management: launch, reboot, terminate, get console output, RDP/SSH (Remote Desktop Protocol/Secure Shell) help, etc.
3. Security group management: create and delete security groups, add and remove permissions, configure firewall settings, open and close ports
4. Elastic IP panagement: create and release (Internet Protocol) addresses, associate IPs to instances
5. Elastic block store: create, delete, attach, and detach volumes. Take snapshots and manage snapshots.
6. Key pair management: create and delete public/private key pairs.

There is a video of the Web GUI here by Mike Culver that show just how easy it is to get started with Amazon’s EC2

It will be interesting to see what the fallout of this move will be in the coming months and what type of market share Amazon will take away from the other services that have been around much longer.
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Scalr.net simple management for EC2 instances

At my work we have been experimenting with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and come to the point that we wanted to build a scalable application on it and not have to micro manage all of the instances.   Enter Scalr.net, the simple way to manage EC2 instances and make them easily scale.  Everything has been mostly painless, and any problems were quickly resolved with their excellent support.   It was much simpler getting an instance up and running  with Scalr than via Amazon’s various  command line tools.

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