[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.