EC2's M3 Instances Go Global; Reduced EC2 Charges and Lower Bandwidth Prices

We continue to work to make AWS more powerful and less expensive, and to pass the savings on to you. To that end, I have three important announcements:

• EC2's M3 instance family is now available in all AWS Regions including AWS GovCloud (US).
• On-Demand prices for EC2 instances in the M1, M2, M3, and C1 families have been lowered.
• Prices for data transfer between AWS Regions have also been lowered.

M3 Global Rollout
We launched the M3 family of EC2 instances last fall, with initial availability in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region. Also known as the Second Generation Standard Instances, members of the M3 family (Extra Large and Double Extra Large) feature up to 50% higher absolute CPU performance than their predecessors. All instances are 64-bit and are optimized for applications such as media encoding, batch processing, caching, and web serving.

I'm pleased to announce that you can now launch M3 instances in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), AWS GovCloud (US), Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) Regions. We plan to make the M3 instances available in the South America (Brazil) Region in the coming weeks.

On-Demand Price Reduction
We are reducing the price of On-Demand Amazon EC2 instances running Linux world-wide, effective February 1, 2013.

This reduction applies to all members of the M1 (First Generation Standard), M2 (High Memory), M3 (Second Generation Standard), and C1 (High-CPU) families. The size of the reductions vary, but generally average 10-20%. Here are the reductions, by family and by Region:

	Savings (%)
Region	M1	M2	M3	C1 Medium	C1 Extra Large
US East (Northern Virginia)	7.7%	8.9%	13.8%	12.1%	12.1%
US West (Northern California)	27.7%	9.1%	-	11.3%	11.3%
US West (Oregon)	7.7%	8.9%	-	12.1%	12.1%
AWS GovCloud (US)	22.3%	9.3%	-	9.8%	9.8%
Europe (Ireland)	23.5%	9.1%	-	11.3%	11.3%
Asia Pacific (Singapore)	5.9%	2.2%	-	1.6%	1.9%
Asia Pacific (Tokyo)	4.3%	2.5%	-	2.6%	2.6%
Asia Pacific (Sydney)	5.9%	2.2%	-	1.6%	1.9%
South America (São Paulo)	30.4%	20.6%	-	13.0%	13.0%

Pricing for the M3 instances in the Regions where they are newly available already reflect the economies of scale that allowed us to make the reductions that we are announcing today.

As usual, your AWS bill will automatically reflect the lower prices.

Regional Data Transfer Price Reduction
With nine AWS Regions in operation (and more in the works), you can already build global applications that have a presence in two or more Regions.

Previously, we have charged normal internet bandwidth prices for data transfer between Regions. In order to make this increasingly common scenario even more cost-effective, we are significantly lowering the cost of transferring data between AWS Regions (by 26% to 83%), effective February 1, 2013. You can already transfer data into a Region at no charge ($0.00 / Gigabyte); this price reduction applies to data leaving one Region for another Region.

Here are the details:

Region	Old Price / GB	New Price / GB	Savings
US East (Northern Virginia)	$0.120	$0.020	83%
US West (Northern California)	$0.120	$0.020	83%
US West (Oregon)	$0.120	$0.020	83%
AWS GovCloud (US)	$0.155	$0.030	81%
Europe (Ireland)	$0.120	$0.020	83%
Asia Pacific (Singapore)	$0.190	$0.090	53%
Asia Pacific (Tokyo)	$0.200	$0.090	55%
Asia Pacific (Sydney)	$0.190	$0.140	26%
South America (São Paulo)	$0.250	$0.160	36%

This pricing applies to data transferred out of Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets, and Amazon Glacier vaults.

The new pricing also applies to CloudFront origin fetches. In other words, the cost to use CloudFront in conjunction with static data stored in S3 or dynamic data coming from EC2 will decline as a result of this announcement. This is an important aspect of AWS -- the services become an even better value when used together.

Let's work through an example to see what this means in practice. Suppose you are delivering 100 TB of content per month to your users, with a 10% cache miss rate (90% of the requests are delivered from a cached copy in a CloudFront edge location), and that this content comes from the Standard or Europe (Ireland) Amazon S3 Region. The cost of your origin fetches (from CloudFront to S3) will drop from $1,228.68 to $204.80, an 83% reduction.

Again, your next AWS bill will reflect the lower prices. You need not do anything to benefit.

-- Jeff;

Comments

[Peter]

Will Windows pricing see a similar price reduction any time soon?

[Eric Hammond]

Should AWS customers continue to assume that traffic between AWS regions may be transiting public, untrusted networks? Or, are all of these connections now dedicated, owned and controlled by Amazon?

I realize that Amazon has recommended that sensitive data be encrypted in transit, even within an EC2 region, but there has been a sense that intra-region has been more protected than between regions. Has this changed?

[Phoenixbot2013]

We are happy about these changes. We use servers in South America and noticed a significant price missmatch between the on-demand and spot prices. These hint to us a large amount of unused hardware, so hopefully these changes will also help you to get economical down there again.

[Samuel Hale]

@Eric Hammond:

I think the pricing probably comes down to a volume discount AWS has negotiated with internet carriers, probably because of the incredible amounts of traffic already flowing between the various AWS "regions". In contrast, and not officially confirmed, it would seem intra-region traffic is probably running over private fiber owned/managed by AWS directly. Hence intra-region traffic pipes are probably dedicated only to AWS, while inter-region traffic is probably still running over the public internet. At least that's my guess. It's also possible they lease metro-fiber carriers to actually handle the intra-region traffic in some markets, but even in those cases, I'd have to assume AWS traffic is pretty well segmented from any other traffic.

Even if Amazon does run it's own fiber between a few different regions, there's no way they can do that everywhere around the world. Unless they really want to become their own Tier-1 carrier... which I kinda doubt they do.

That said, anything sensitive should still be encrypted from the moment it hits any network pipe to the moment it arrives at the other end. It's tempting to omit encryption within a region, and it may sometimes be worthwhile for certain data, but it's also a lot safer to assume every network pipe is insecure until proven otherwise.

[Laust]

Wow.. this really increases Amazon's competitiveness. With the new prices here, it will be even harder to avoid Amazon when talking hosting.

[maicon]

And for Reseverd instances?? Regional Data Transfer Price will reduce too? Because i see in my account activity and is taking $0,250 for South America (São Paulo).

Is not right cost, $0,160.