Amazon’s has introduced a new pricing model for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The pricing option, know as “Spot Instances,” allows users to bid what they wish for CPU cycles — but if someone else is willing to pay more, you’re out of luck. The Amazon strategy is worth noting for VARs and MSPs alike. Here’s why.
“Spot Instances allow customers to bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long as their bid exceeds the current Spot Price,” says the official Amazon announcement. “The Spot Price changes periodically based on supply and demand, and customers whose bids meet or exceed it gain access to the available Spot Instances.”
If you’re already running an instance, you will apparently also have the option to expand your processing capabilities using the Spot Price, according to the same rules. This will obviously result in peak usage times and drop-offs, but conversely, it means that if you don’t want to pay the going rate for time on EC2, you no longer have to.
This raises an interesting question for resellers developing cloud applications: Do you really need on-demand access, or can you afford to keep your purse strings drawn and pass the savings on to your clients? Moreover, is it worth the hassle of having to save your work constantly if your instance can be interrupted with no notice? Time will tell, but Amazon’s making a bold move into pay-what-you-wish with this announcement. We’ll be keeping an eye on them, rest assured.
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The instance termination of an instance I think is going to be problematic. I think Amazon is going to have to implement some sort of shutdown notification with a minimum timeout and give instance some way to look for an impending shutdown and do end of instance clean up.
It’s not any different than having a system sitting on a UPS and wanting to do a clean shutdown on power failure. Expecting every instance to save state continuously is a bit ridiculous that would require people to re-engineer virtual instances differently from normal EC-2 to be spot pricing ready. You don’t want to waste time and cpu cycles saving internal state unncessarily even if your crunching scientific calculations.
Providing 1 to 5 minutes of pollable warning facility like an external UPS typically does seems far more reasonable and would be useful for general purpose EC2 instance as well.
-jef
Jef: What’s your take on all the cloud noise? Is the media (The VAR Guy included) hyping the market too much or do you see some practical, real-world opportunities ahead?
-TVG
1) It’s over-hyped. It’s introduced a 3rd attractor in the age old centralized server or de-centralized network pendulum swing of IT. The grass is always greener. The first business adopters of cloud services now will be the first ones to shift back to traditional infrastructure in one or two technology cycles.
2) Pundits are not spending enough time talking about security and privacy implications of public clouds as more business look at using pay as you go utility computing services. The potential for cross-image attacks through the host system should scare daylights out of you if you are an EC2 customer and you are doing something more serious than “rendering”. I have way to many aws ip addresses sitting in my denyhosts file for attempt to ssh password bruteforce into my systems for my liking…and I’m not even a customer. This issue isn’t such a big deal for private on-premises clouds. But on-premises clouds don’t scale economically for small to mid sized business like contracting with a public cloud. The real advantages and problems are in the public clouds.
3) We are going to see another ~3 years of growth in utility computing vendors spinning up all sorts of ideas and business models before the first real competition crunch happens and there is a vendor die-off.
4) We won’t really know what this crap is best used for until 16 year kids figure out a new use for it that is blindingly obvious in hindsight.
5) Spot pricing scares the absolute crap out of me. Can you imagine if as a consumers we had to deal with spot pricing for all our utilities? For voice and data service? For electricity? For municipal water? I do not like the idea of utility pricing being a whim of instance market demand like the stock or commodity market. Amazon’s is basically setting itself up for a price manipulation scandal in the vein of the Enron scandal over the electricity cost in California.
-jef