New Amazon EC2 Micro Instances - New, Low Cost Option for Low Throughput Applications

I can’t tell you how many of you have told me you’d like to run smaller applications at lower cost on EC2. These applications are typically low traffic/low throughput—web applications, web site hosting, various types of periodic cron jobs and the like.

I’m happy to say we have now built an instance type exactly for these purposes, called Micro instances, starting at $0.02 (two cents) per hour for Linux/Unix and $0.03 (three cents) per hour for Windows.

Micro Instances (t1.micro) provide a small amount of consistent CPU resources and allow you to burst CPU capacity when additional cycles are available. They are available now in all Regions. You can buy Reserved Micro Instances and you can acquire Micro Instances on the Spot Market. Interestingly enough, they are available in both 32 and 64 bit flavors, both with 613 MB of RAM. The Micro Instances have no local, ephemeral storage, so you'll need to Boot from EBS.

CloudWatch can be used to watch the level of CPU utilization to understand when the available CPU bursting has been used within a given time period. If your instance's CPU utilization is approaching 100% then you may want to scale (using Auto Scaling) to additional Micro instances or to a larger instance type. In fact, at this low a price you could run CloudWatch configured for Auto Scaling with two Micro instances behind an Elastic Load Balancer for just under the price of one CloudWatch-monitored Standard Small instance.

While designed to host web applications and web sites that don't receive all that much traffic (generally tens of requests per minute, depending on how much CPU time is needed to process the request), I'm pretty sure that you'll be able to put this new instance type to use in some interesting ways. Here are some of my thoughts:

1. DNS servers, load balancers, proxies, and similar services that handle a relatively low volume of requests.
2. Lightweight cron-driven tasks such as monitoring, health checks, or data updates.
3. Hands-on training and other classroom use.

Feel free to post your ideas (and your other thoughts) in the comments.

Update: The AWS Simple Monthly Calculator now includes the Micro instances. The calculation at right illustrates the costs for a three year Reserved Instance running Linux/Unix full time.

 

-- Jeff;

Comments

[Abhishek Amit]

Can these be used for elastic map reduce jobs? Would be great for jobs that don't need a small instance for a full hour.

[1ndus]

Jeff:

This is a winner. With auto-scaling enabled, a lot of developers would wanna move and handle the load as it comes. $5/month on the spot-pricing..unbelieveable.

Kudos!
Indus
http://www.khaitan.org

[Committedexpert]

A ranking of pricing based on small instance price was done in Cloudtweaks.com

http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2010/09/part-2-cloud-computing-comparisons-between-aws-rackspace-and-gogrid/#more-3468

Micro Instance price announced is low; as low as about $ 20 a month!

Definitely worth a mention!!

Malick.

[phraktle]

nice! there should also be 64 bit small instances, so there's a smooth migration path from micro->small->large...

[Chris Moyer]

Not even a 10GB root partition though? EBS-boot only is quite the turn-off to me, especially if you can't go right from a micro64 to a small64...

[Ericf]

I would also love to see 64-bit Small Instances to be announced with the Micro ones as well.

[Adron]

Now I'll have to update my blog entry about running Wordpress in Azure vs. AWS (http://compositecode.com/2010/08/24/aws-vs-windows-azure-wordpress/). :)

[Cloudcontroller]

SMBs will eat these up- great news!

[Huanliu.wordpress.com]

The price is cheap, but you get what you paid for. On average, you get 0.35 ECU (still a bargain since you only pay for 25% of an m1.small instance). Sometimes, you can burst up to 2.5 ECU, better than what they advertised. Fully analysis here http://huanliu.wordpress.com/2010/09/10/amazon-ec2-micro-instances-deeper-dive/

[Rail Sabirov]

It is great news!
But seems it doesn't work.
I create 2 micro instances, but even after 12 hours I can not get access to instance, because I get following message then I try to get password "Not available yet.
Password generation and encryption takes a few moments. Please wait up to 15 minutes after launching an instance before trying to retrieve the generated password".

I many people also has some error! I are not get offical amazon commnet on this porblem.

[Rail Sabirov]

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/message.jspa?messageID=193461#193461

[Mitch Labrador]

This is great. If we could just get an instance between small and large now, then it would be perfection.

[Eric]

I'm very pleased with the micro EC2 offering - now if we could get micro RDS instances, it'd be perfect for smaller sites that want to scale.

[Charles Duffy]

To me, these look *perfect* for running an LVS-based load balancer -- which needs next to nothing in terms of RAM, disk or CPU, but quite a lot of bandwidth. However, the above doesn't advertise them as suitable for that use except in very installations -- perhaps we're able to get so starved for timeshare that we can't even keep up with servicing the network?

It's a disappointment, if so, not to have something available that's a good fit for the niche.

[Ng]

Ask AWS: Can I use the Micro instance run WordPress site?

[sinlung]

yes..am using wordpress...on AWS..preety cool

[Tyson Trautmann]

Only downside on Micros is that they can tip over in a hurry: http://www.etherealbits.com/?p=97. The beauty of AWS is it takes all of 2 minutes to temporarily upgrade to a large during a spike and update your Elastic IP accordingly. The pain of AWS is that you have to do that manually (would be great if you could automate the switch).