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Nothing has been announced, but fwiw, I've been running benchmarks comparing the SSD block storage at Rackspace (http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/blockstorage/pricing/), as well as the all-SSD VMs from Digital Ocean (http://www.digitalocean.com/), and frankly, the CPU & I/O blow away EC2 so far. Compared to Google Compute Engine (https://cloud.google.com/pricing/compute-engine), CPU is on par, but obviously SSD is going to best even zippy local instance spindle storage. For example, calculating 8th order Fermat prime factors (single thread/core intensive, so ymmv), EC2 XLs are getting smoked by 20-50% vs. Digital Ocean's 2 core 2GB RAM/40GB SSD. Replicated in multiple data centers/zones a dozen times. Not bad for $20/month! Also, for the low end, remember "core" on EC2 is throttled at 50%-75% for the small & medium instances, translating to lots of stolen cpu time. Still working out the details on the Rackspace SSD EBS-equivalents, but will post update soon. But, agreed, given across-the-board I/O benefits of SSD, surprised Amazon isn't offering something in the non-cluster category. And at $2,500+ /mo, the new instances are definitely targeting a very niche use case for burst-heavy batching. |