Amazon EC2 pricing models

Cloud computing is changing the way IT resources are utilized. Now a days cloud computing is one of the Innovated technology platform & emerging trend for IT industry & certainly not limited to it.

Cloud computing is a simple idea, but it can have a huge impact on business.

There are many vendors for enabling/providing cloud computing solutions like Amazon, VMWare, Rackspace and many more.

Today we will focus on Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud).

Amazon is a leading public cloud computing provider, AWS (Amazon Web Services) falls in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) space, providing on demand service using virtual server instances with unique IP addresses and blocks of storage.

It's a news for me and may be for many of us that AWS opening a data center in Singapore to make its entry in the Asia Pacific region has created a lot of interest about Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) in India.

So just to take a quick tour of AWS offerings - AWS provides various components/services like Amazon EC2, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

As AWS is stepping in to Asia Pacific region I'm very excited to know what will be the pricing model for their service offerings. So let's take a look at their pricing model.

Amazon EC2 pricing models follows a "pay-as-you-go" model (as in any other cloud computing model) however the flexibility is at it's par in case of Amazon EC2 pricing model.

When it comes to Amazon EC2 pricing models, the instances are grouped into three families:
1. Standard,
2. High-Memory
3. High-CPU.

Amazon EC2 pricing for each of these instances is as follows:

1. Standard Instances -- This model have memory to CPU ratios suitable for most general purpose applications. This Amazon EC2 pricing model ranges from $0.12 per hour to $ 0.96 per hour, for services running on Windows infrastructure. For infrastructure running on Linux and UNIX, Amazon EC2 pricing starts with $0.095 per hour to $0.76 per hour.

2. High-Memory instances -- This Amazon EC2 pricing model offers larger memory sizes for high throughput applications, including database and memory caching applications. This is priced at $ 0.62 per hour to $2.88 per hour for Windows based infrastructure. For Linux/UNIX based instances in this pricing model of Amazon EC2, prices range from $0.57 per hour to $2.68 per hour.

3. High-CPU instances: In this Amazon EC2 pricing model, proportionally more CPU resources are consumed than memory (RAM), and as a a result it targets compute-intensive applications. This Amazon EC2 suite has been priced at $0.29 per hour to $1.16 per hour for Windows based infrastructure. For Linux or UNIX based infrastructure, this Amazon EC2 pricing model charges from $0.19 per hour to $0.76 per hour.



When choosing Amazon EC2 pricing types, organizations should consider characteristics of their application with regards to resource utilization. Accordingly, they should select the optimal instance family and size.

Now we have understood the pricing model & now next question comes in heart is how about support model so here we go -

here are two AWS Premium Support offerings—Gold and Silver. The following is the breakup of the services.


Gold Support includes:


-Business day support (6 a.m. to 6 p.m.)
-24x7x365 coverage.
-One-on-one support via web-based ticketing system.
-One-on-one support via telephone.
-1 hour maximum response time for "Urgent issues".
-Guaranteed response time for non-urgent issues.
-Client-side diagnostic tools.
-Named support contacts.


Silver Support includes:


-Business day support (6 a.m. to 6 p.m.).
-One-on-one support via web-based ticketing system.
-Guaranteed response time for non-urgent issues.
-Client-side diagnostic tools.
-Named support contacts.

I hope it's worth knowing all this information as a IT Infrastructure professional.

Also as we all know pictures talks louder & who agree to it then here is a very good video for understanding cloud computing in simple language.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdBd14rjcs0

Hope this article helps...