One of the most common issues we hear is that I/O on AWS is hard to predict, and often a bottleneck for applications. So today’s news that AWS have introduced two new ways to improve your I/O performance is an exciting development.
Aside from the performance benefits, these new options also introduce a number of additional cost variables. I’m excited to announce that, on the same day of introduction (as we did we programmatic billing!) CloudVertical now fully supports, analyses and provides reporting for these new EBS and EC2 options!
We thought you might find it useful to get more information on the cost implications, so continue reading to learn about the options, costs and how they differ from existing standard EC2 and EBS resources.
New Instance Costs
3 existing instance types can now be deployed with EBS-optimized support (all examples taken using US East (Virginia) and Linux)
Large: Additional 2.5¢ per hour / $18.60 per month – 7.8% higher
Extra Large: Additional 5¢ per hour / $37.20 – 7.8% higher
Quadruple Extra Large: Additional 5¢ per hour / $37.20 – 2.7% higher
Storage Pricing
Standard: 10¢ per GB-month
Provisioned IOPS: 12.5¢ per GB-month – a 25% increase.
I/O Pricing
Standard: $10c per 1 million I/O requests
Provisioned IOPS: $10c per 1 IOPS-month
Since IOPS are a dedicated channel, you will be billed whether or not you use the resources. 1 IOPS-month is the equivalent of 2.7m requests (1 Input-Output Operation per Second x Seconds in a Month). For estimation purposes, it’s unlikely your I/O costs are going to change dramatically on a per request or provisioned-IOPS basis – unless you massively over-provision – and here lies the hard part – how do you know what IOPS to pre buy?
Looking at your previous month requests will help – but bear in mind for a high performance application – these may be lower because of the I/O performance restrictions on standard EBS volumes. I would provision 30-50% more IOPS than used last month (remember : 270m I/O requests = 100 IOPS), and keep track of usage for the first few weeks.
Example
A large instance with EBS optimised, running for a month, with a 500GB Provionsed IOPS EBS volume and 100 IOPS committed, would cost $319 ($256.60 for the instance, $62.50 for the EBS and $10 for IOPS). A large instance on normal EBS would be $298 or $315 depending on your calculation. So near parity or a 6.6% difference (the lower figure is taking 35% of the committed 100 IOPS-month since you are highly unlikely to use all the resources, all of the time – and AWS pricing reflects this).
What this looks like in CloudVertical
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