Amazon AWS offers compute space in the cloud. Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a web service that provides re-sizeable compute capacity in the cloud on demand basis. To setup the on-premise computing will take minimum couple of months to make it operational. But in the cloud service based computing will be available in few minutes.
Here is the list of Amazon’s EC2 different prizing models offered by:
= > On Demand instances
= > Capacity Reserved Instance
= > Spot instances
= > Dedicated hosts
On Demand instances:
In On Demand instance type prizing mode, you will be only paying for the EC2 instances that you use. Recently Amazon have introduced the per second billing for EC2 instances unlike hourly basis charges. On this prizing model , you no need to plan for the spikes and utilization. You will be paying how much resource you use.
Earlier Pricing is per instance-hour consumed for each instance, from the time an instance is launched until it is terminated or stopped. Each partial instance-hour consumed will be billed as a full hour.
Use cases : Un-predictable work loads, No upfront fee cases, Testing application on amazon instance for first time and temporary instances.
EC2 Reserved Instances:
EC2 reserved instances allows you to reserve the capacity for more predictable workloads. Off-course on demand instance also will serve the required capacity but you will get up to 75% discount by using the reserved instances . The prizing also depends on instance type , availability zone, capacity and platform. Any factor decides the prizing is committing the resources for certain period. If you reserve the instance for an year , you will get up to 54% discount and if you reserve the instance for for three year , you will get update to 60% discount. Paying full upfront fee will have more saving than paying monthly basis.
EC2 RI offers the market place to sell the reserved instances to third party if you not using it .
Use cases: Predictable workloads and forecast instance tenure. Application that requires reserved capacity. Users who can pay up-front fee that can reduce the instance cost further.
Spot instances:
You can bid on spare Amazon EC2 computing capacity for cheaper prizing using Amazon EC2 Spot instances. The Spot instance prize fluctuates based on the supply and demand of available unused Amazon EC2 capacity. If you are planning to get the spot instance, you need to specify the maximum amount you are willing to pay for the instance. once the ec2 spot instance is launched , it will allow to run until the spot instance prize is not exceeding the prize you have defined. If the spot prize goes up than your defined prize, instance will be terminated automatically.
Amazon guarantees that you will not be charged for more than what you have bid. At the same time , instances will not be terminated if the bid prize is higher than the spot instance prize. You must specify the end duration of the instances.
If the Spot price exceeds your specified price, your instance will receive a two-minute notification before it is terminated, and you will not be charged for the partial hour that your instance has run.
Please refer the following link to know the current spot instance prizing.
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/pricing/
Use cases : Application that have flexible start and stop times. Applications which can’t afford standard Amazon instance fee. Research companies data simulation with low cost.
Dedicated hosts
Dedicated hosts are mostly used to fulfill the corporate compliance and regulatory requirements. This will also help you to use your existing server-bound software licenses. It can be purchased on On-demand prizing model . You will have great visibility to place the amazon instances when you have dedicated hosts available. You have visibility of the number of sockets and physical cores that support your instances on a Dedicated Host. This will help to manage the software licensing.
EC2 Instances Types:
Amazon offers different type of instances based on your workload. Here is the list of instance type currently available in latest generation of EC2.
| Instance Family | Current Generation Instance Types | Purpose |
| General purpose | t2.nano m3.medium t2.micro m3.large t2.small m3.xlarge t2.medium m3.xlarge t2.large m4.large t2.xlarge m4.xlarge t2.2xlarge m4.2xlarge m4.4xlarge m4.10xlarge m4.16xlarge |
T – Webservers & small DB servers M – Application Servers . |
| Compute optimized | c3.large c3.xlarge c3.2xlarge c3.4xlarge c3.8xlarge c4.large c4.xlarge c4.2xlarge c4.4xlarge c4.8xlarge |
C- CPU intensive Applications and databases |
| Memory optimized | r3.large x1.16xlarge r3.xlarge x1.32xlarge r3.2xlarge x1e.32xlarge r3.4xlarger 3.8xlarge r4.large r4.xlarge r4.2xlarge r4.4xlarge r4.8xlarge r4.16xlarge |
R – Memory Intensive Applications X- SAP HANA & Apache Spark . |
| Storage optimized | i2.xlarge d2.2xlarge i2.2xlarge d2.4xlarge i2.4xlarge d2.8xlarge i2.8xlarge i3.large i3.xlarge i3.2xlarge i3.4xlarge i3.8xlarge i3.16xlarge |
D – Hadoop instances , Fileservers , Datawarehousing I – High Speed Storage SSD – NoSQL & Datawarehousing |
| Accelerated computing | g2.2xlarge p2.xlarge f1.2xlarge g2.8xlarge p2.8xlarge f1.16xlarge g3.4xlarge p2.16xlarge g3.8xlarge g3.16xlarge |
F- Hardware Accelaration for your code. P – Graphsics related applications , Machine learning G – Graphics intensive , 3D accelration |
We have seen the different Amazon EC2 prizing model and various instance types on this article. In the upcoming article ,we will see that how to launch the EC2 instance from Amazon web portal.
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