EC2 Instance Types – Pricing, Comparison, and our Favorites

October 8, 2012 Off By David
Contributed Article.  Author: Eric Anderson, co-founder, CopperEgg
CloudCow Contributed Article
 

EC2 Instance Types – Pricing, Comparison, and our Favorites

Recently at the local Austin DevOps Meet-up, I talked about the CopperEgg EC2 infrastructure that is the back end of our server performance monitoring product. Of particular interest was the piece on a few common EC2 gotchas.  One of the things I talked about is a spreadsheet we use to compare different EC2 instance sizes together to optimize the right fit for our needs. 
 
We commonly need to adjust our infrastructure. So there are frequent questions, like "We need more memory, which size do we upgrade  to from a c1.xlarge?"  So, we put a spreadsheet together to help us remember some of the qualities of the different instances. It helps us translate the hourly cost to a monthly cost, and show the reserved instance cost as well.
 

 
Some things you can learn from it are interesting facts like:
  • A t1.micro has the cheapest cost per CPU, but has horrid CPU steal
  • A cg1.4xlarge has the most expensive cost per GB memory
  • the cheapest cost per CPU system (that is NOT a micro) is a cc2.8xlarge.   
So, we decided to share the spreadsheet (we had many requests for it).  We keep this pretty up-to-date, so if you see something missing, let us know.  
 
Here’s our list of favorite instance sizes:
  • c1.xlarge: great compute, but still cost effective to have them spread across several zones
  • hi1.4xlarge: the ephemeral storage is INSANELY fast.  We’ve seen massive IO on these, and great compute. Hint: use ‘hvm’ instead of ‘pv’ (paravirtualized) or you will have instances crashing a lot.
  • cc2.8xlarge: lots of compute, and 10gbit networking make this compute workhorses cost effective for heavy compute applications
  • t1.micro: for test systems…and nothing more!
 
Here’s a link to the Google doc with the details We hope you find this useful.




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About the Author

Eric Anderson’s past experience as both a software engineer and systems administrator for companies including Centaur Technologies and StorSpeed give him the edge in really understanding IT-related challenges and finding appropriate, effective solutions for CopperEgg’s customers. Eric runs CopperEgg’s operations and helps drive CopperEgg’s vision and direction.