On-Demand/Reserved EC2 Price vs Hardware Costs

During the last week I have been trying to continue writing my thesis, but it advances very slowly. I however did some interesting research about the relation between on-demand price reductions in EC2 (focus on US East region) and the hardware cost reduction that happened over time. A draft of the appendix containing this research is embedded here.



If this text appears as small as it does for me, you can download the PDF here as well.

New Asia Region & SpotWatch Update

Amazon released a new (5th) regions for AWS a couple of days ago, this was announced by Jeff Barr on the Amazon Web Services Blog like this:

We've just opened up an AWS Region in Japan, Tokyo to be precise. The new region supports Amazon EC2 (including Elastic IP Addresses, Amazon CloudWatch, Elastic Block Storage, Elastic Load Balancing, VM Import, and Auto Scaling), Amazon S3, Amazon SimpleDB, the Amazon Relational Database Service, the Amazon Simple Queue Service, the Amazon Simple Notification Service, Amazon Route 53, and Amazon CloudFront. All of the usual EC2 instance types are available with the exception of the Cluster Compute and Cluster GPU. The page for each service includes full pricing information for the Region.

I looked into this new region and made conclusions, some of them are listed below. The Excel file containing all of the tables and graphs can be found here. I delayed the pricing analysis that includes spot instances, since there is only data available from the first 4 days since the launch of this new Tokyo region. I added however support for this new region to my SpotWatch tool website, so we'll be able to follow the price evolution easily. I also made some little changes, check it out at the SpotWatch website. Thanks for the feedback I got about this little tool, it's fun to see people are interested in my work.

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  It's the first time that the fixed upfront investment for a reserved instance is different for a region, all other regions hold the same fixed prices. These in Tokyo are a bit higher.


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  The on-demand prices for linux instances are the most expensive in the Tokyo region, US-East is still the cheapest region, all others hold the same hourly price values that lay between the ones of these two regions.


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  Reserved instances are more expensive in the new Notheast Asia region relative to on-demand prices than in the other regions (except for the Micro instance).


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  Data transfer costs are the same in the US and EU regions, they are a bit higher in Southeast Asia and even more expensive in the new Tokyo region.

I started writing again too, I hope to finish a draft version of the 2nd/3rd chapter of my thesis soon.