[bzz01]

I've built this page since I often just want to pick a spot instance type that gives me biggest bang for the buck. Amazon's own pricing page is still very confusing, and ec2instances.info is great but it is a static website and adding spot prices there is nontrivial.

I've also fixed a few minor things that annoyed me, such as correct sorting by instance type (so that r3.16x goes after r3.4x) and added a mode to display spot savings vs on-demand.

Would appreciate any feedback!

[purespark2]

This is very useful for me too. Thanks for putting it together!

For me, it would also be nice to see the total price/time unit on the same table as the price/gb.

[jbverschoor]

Best bang for buck is not at amazon.

[chx]

Right. So the Show HN page says you can barely go below $5 per gigabyte with on-demand pricing. OVH RAM instances consistently cost 1.33 $/GB for a machine with 30, 60, 120 or 240GB of RAM.

[nodesocket]

I havent looked at OVH lately, but are they really a cloud? Do they provide full VPC with central firewall? Dynamic network disk storage that can be mapped to servers?

[eropple]

OVH does have their vRack stuff these days, but it's iffy and clearly intended for dedicated hardware. They have no block storage that I'm aware of.

[bryanlarsen]

They do have it: https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/public-cloud/storage/additional-di...

It's OpenStack Cinder.

They also have object storage, Swift: https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/public-cloud/storage/object-storag...

[eropple]

TIL, thanks! Didn't realize OVH was OpenStack--that's a pretty hard no for me, because I've witnessed firsthand the failure conditions there, but I appreciate the correction.

[mschuster91]

How does EBS work, anyway? Is it some form of NFS with caching under the hood?

[eropple]

It's not NFS, it's a block storage mechanism. NFS presents a file-based interface, EBS is a block/device-based interface. The underlying implementation isn't widely publicized, but if you think about how a block device works on a Unix and the AWS bigger-is-faster model for non-PIOPS EBS, you can probably draw some reasonable inferences.

[loeg]

PIOPS?

[floatboth]

EBS is some kind of Network Block Device. NFS is another product, https://aws.amazon.com/efs/

[ty_a]

IIRC EBS is based on GNBD.

[chx]

Such rumors have been around for quite a while -- Amazon is not talking -- but their relevant patent https://www.google.com/patents/US8769186 has

> For example, in at least some embodiments, a representative logical local block data storage device may be made available to an executing program via use of GNBD (“Global Network Block Device”) technology.

[eropple]

If all you need is compute and RAM, then OVH dedicated machines are a great choice; I used them for a long time myself and would again for personal stuff. That said, it's important to remember that focusing on that to the exclusion of turn-key services (RDS has saved clients of mine tens of thousands of dollars in billable hours just by itself) doesn't do you so well once you need more than that.

[shimon_e]

OVH have a beta RDS-like service. https://www.runabove.com/index.xml

[eropple]

When they have RDS and Redshift and and Athena and SQS and SNS and when they have a fully-functional API that crosses every platform I need to write code against and years of a proven track record of stone-cold simplicity and success, I am sure I will take that into account.

Time is valuable. AWS/GCE/Azure have a huge head start in making us more productive.