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New Amazon EC2 Micro Instances Offer Option for Low-Throughput Applications |
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| 9/10/2010 9:18:41 AM | |
Cloud computing provider Amazon Web hosting Services has launched "Micro Instances," which offer a low priced option for running lower throughput applications and websites that consume significant compute cycles periodically. According to AWS evangelist Jeff Barr, Micro Instances (also known in AWS jargon as "t1.micro") are now available in all regions, and start at two cents per hour for Linux/Unix and three cents per hour for Windows instances. They are designed to provide a small amount of consistent CPU resources, with the ability to burst CPU capacity when additional cycles are available. They are available in both 32 and 64 bit varieties, both with 613 MB of RAM. "I can't tell you how many of you have told me you'd like to run smaller applications at lower cost on EC2. These applications are typically low traffic/low throughput - Webapplications, web site hosting, various types of periodic cron jobs and the like," Barr wrote in a blog post. "I'm happy to say we have now built an instance type exactly for these purposes." Another interesting option is "Reserved Micro Instances", which pairs Micro Instances with the Reserved Instances option introduced last year that gives users the option to make a one-time payment to reserve an instance, which gives them, in turn, a significant hourly discount on using that instance. Users can also buy Micro Instances on the instance Web hosting marketplace Spot Market, though the price of these instances could vary depending on market conditions. Instances can be tracked with Amazon's CloudWatch utility, and if CPU utilization approaches 100 percent, the user can decide to scale to additional Micro instances or to a larger instance type. Influential analyst Lydia Leong suggests that this could provide a stepping stone for many businesses going to the cloud. "Smaller instances are perfect for a lot of enterprise applications,"stated Leong, research director in the technology and service providers group at technology consultancy Gartner (www.gartner.com). "Tons of enterprise apps are "paperwork apps" - fill in a form, kick off some process, be able to report on it later. They get very little traffic, and consolidating the myriad tertiary low-volume applications is one of the things that often drives the most attractive Web hosting virtualization consolidation ratios. (People are reluctant to run multiple apps on a single OS instance, especially on Windows, due to stability issues, so being able to give each app its own VM is a popular solution.)" She said that Amazon's Micro Instances could be part of an effort to offer better options for enterprises, given that "tiny tertiary apps are a major use case for initial migration to the cloud," but they should also be attractive for some testing and development applications. |
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SRC: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/090910_New_Amazon_EC2_Micro_Instances_Offer_Option_for_Low_Throughput_Applications |
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