[twotwotwo]

- No one pick a host based on a single microbenchmark, please. Game out what your app would need to achieve your target performance level with what each host offers. Amazon still might lose (sounds like that happened with TripAdvisor) but at least you've made your decision a sane way.

- For the best price, you'd want to use a reserved instance if this is a webserver, and perhaps a spot instance if it's a batch/HPC task. You'd want to use high-CPU instances if you really are all about quickly sorting 5M numbers. If your app is or might be come database-bound, DB perf's super key.

- I'd love to hear more broadly about the practical differences between the clouds--whether anyone seems to be better at managing noisy neighbors than the next guy, network and I/O performance, etc. One CPU-bound task can't really be the end of it.

[twotwotwo]

Did the math on how to get cheaper ECU-hours from Amazon. Prices below are per ECU-hour, not per instance-hour; '1yr' is the one-year reserved instance price with the upfront cost amortized; 'spot' is the spot price in the US West (Oregon) region when I looked just now.

Small: 6.5 cents/ecu-hr

Small, 1yr: 4.7 cents/ecu-hr

Small, spot: 1 cent/ecu-hr

High-CPU: 3.3 cents/ecu-hr

High-CPU, 1yr: 1.9 cents/ecu-hr

High-CPU, spot: 0.56 cents/ecu-hr

If RAM matters, high-CPU (7G, or 3.5/core) > Small (1.7G) > EC2 Micro and Joyent extra-small (~0.5G). Again, don't rely too much on figures like these; look at all your needs (not just performance, everything) and try to figure out what'll work for you.

[zimbatm]

cc2.8xlarge is the best in terms of price/ECU-hours. You get a whopping 60GB of RAM, 10Gbps network interface. Downsides are: EBS only, us-east-1 only.

cc2.8xlarge: 0.15 cents/ecu-hr

cc2.8xlarge 1yr: 0.058 cents/ecu-hr

[twotwotwo]

Ah, it is indeed cheaper, but I'm getting different specific numbers: 240 cents/88 ecu-hr == 2.7 cents/ecu-hr on demand; less if reserved or spot. cc2.8xl is also in the Oregon and Ireland regions, but not others as far as I can tell.

1) Funny that scaling up to one of their largest instance types can improve bang-for-buck, on this metric at least. 2) I wish Amazon made it simpler to sort all this out.

[zimbatm]

Thanks for the check. I don't remember how I calculated that..

Another downside of cc2.8xl is that the spot market is crazy, with spikes at $6/h or more.

[nikcub]

> sounds like that happened with TripAdvisor

is this a reference to another post or story? I Googled and couldn't find it

[twotwotwo]

Yep: http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/10/2/an-epic-tripadviso...