Region Comparison

I had a look at the pricing of EC2 instances for the different geographical regions. Of course not only the money cost should be considered when running an application in the cloud but also the latency the servers in these different locations cause (but you can think of applications that do not care). The prices of the different locations can be found on Amazons website and are presented by me here. A first remark is that only the US East region does offer cluster compute instances. I investigated two different things about the pricing in the different regions:

• What is the cheapest location to run a certain instance? The results can be found here. We notice that for Reserved instances US - N. Virginia is always the cheapest solution. For on-demand instances it is as well, but for Windows instances the EU and Asia region offer the same price.


• How does the price of reserved instances vs on-demand instances compare on these different locations? The results can be found here. We notice that except for Micro instances US East always offers the most advantageous reserved instances. For Linux instances we see no difference between the regions (both for the 1 and 3-year terms). For Windows instances on the other hand we notice that Reserved instances are advantageous after a shorter amount of time in the US regions. It is also remarkable that Micro instances are the only ones that are more quickly advantageous in all regions but the US East one.

Remark that all of this can be found here (an Excel sheet).

Reserved vs On-Demand Instances

On Amazon EC2 these terms have the following meaning:

• Reserved instances:

  They give you the option to make a low, one-time payment for each instance you want to reserve and in turn receive a significant discount on the hourly usage charge for that instance.

• On-Demand instances:

  They let you pay for compute capacity by the hour with no long-term commitments. This frees you from the costs and complexities of planning, purchasing, and maintaining hardware and transforms what are commonly large fixed costs into much smaller variable costs.

I had a look today at the problem of finding the optimal division between Reserved and On-Demand instances. With the optimal solution being the one with the smallest total cost. My findings (in an Excel file) can be found here. Or I put them in two pdf files as well:

• General Pricing Information: download here
• Practical Example: download here