A chart illustrating the comparative pricing of AWS micro instances
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Offering a low-price option for running low-throughput applications and websites that consume significant compute cycles periodically, cloud computing provider Amazon Web Services (aws.amazon.com) has introduced “Micro Instances,” which could drive the price of computing lower than ever before.
Launched in September, Micro Instances (also known in AWS jargon as “t1.micro”) are designed to provide a small amount of consistent CPU resources – and have the ability to burst CPU capacity when additional cycles are available.
Micro Instances are available in all regions, and start at two cents per hour for Linux/Unix instances and three cents per hour for Windows. Both the 32 and 64 bit varieties provide 613 MB of RAM.
“I can’t tell you how many of you have told me you’d like to run smaller applications at lower cost on EC2,” wrote AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a company blog entry. “These applications are typically low traffic/low throughput – web applications, website 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.”
Another interesting option is “Reserved Micro Instances,” which pairs Micro Instances with the Reserved Instances option, introduced last year, which gives users the option to make a one-time payment to reserve an instance and gain, in turn, a significant hourly discount on using that instance.
Alternatively, users can buy Micro Instances on the instance marketplace Spot Market, though the price of these instances could vary depending on market conditions.
Instances can be tracked with Amazon’s CloudWatch utility, and if CPU utilization approaches 100 percent, the user can decide to scale to additional Micro instances or to a larger instance type.
Dave Powers of high-performance and open-source solutions firm Cycle Computing (www.cyclecomputing.com) noted in a recent interview that micro instances mark the latest advancement in the inevitable downward shift in the price of computing.
“What I like about the micro instances is that they are a very low cost, immediate way to simply do some functionality testing,” Powers said. “I see an immediate use case is doing quick testing, and prototyping of things, and now it’s a fourth of the cost or a fifth of the cost that it once was to do that exact same testing.”
Powers notes that micro instances offer a low-cost option for testing, analysis and prototyping.
“For us, for Cycle, testing usually involves scaling something, so we’re not going to test two, but we’re going to test 500, or 1000, or 5000 of them, so we can see a very tangible price reduction for something like that. [It’s] the same for an enterprise.”
He says using micro instances for production applications is a bit more complicated, but could also be very lucrative. “Where it gets a little tricky is how intense the computing is; if it works out that if you can do the computing you need in the micro instance (it’s called micro for a reason) then it’s even better.”
In the typical development process, Powers notes that there’s a tendency to over-load applications with functions – not all of which are essential.
“You kinda get the whole kitchen sink, which requires all sorts of resources to be available. Now they’re going to be thinking about minimizing – keep it simple, keep it precise, only code what you need, don’t include dozens of libraries or packages or modules that you’re never going to use, so that you can’t fit it into a tight environment like that. I absolutely see that as a option also.”
Influential Gartner analyst Lydia Leong suggests that this could provide a stepping stone not just for small businesses, but for enterprises, going to the cloud.
“[S]maller instances are perfect for a lot of enterprise applications,” stated Leong, research director in the technology and service providers group at technology consultancy Gartner (www.gartner.com). “Tons of enterprise apps are ‘paperwork apps’ – fill in a form, kick off some process, be able to report on it later. They get very little traffic, and consolidating the myriad tertiary low-volume applications is one of the things that often drive the most attractive virtualization consolidation ratios. (People are reluctant to run multiple apps on a single OS instance, especially on Windows, due to stability issues, so being able to give each app its own VM is a popular solution.)”
She said that Amazon’s Micro Instances could be part of an effort to offer better options for enterprises, given that “tiny tertiary apps are a major use case for initial migration to the cloud.”
Although they may not fit all particular applications, Micro Instances offer greater options for clients, proving that small is powerful.
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