What is Amazon’s Ec2 Cloud:
Amazon has been progressing steadily towards the cloud hosting platform, and the Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 from Amazon is a type of web service built on cloud computing technology that gives the user a virtual instance of the machine on the cloud to host and run applications on the virtual instance.
Various software of choice can be installed and executed according to the users’ preferences. The way it is designed, helps the developers to scale the web for faster and easier computing capability.
New Business Model:
Amazon has recently brought in a very customer satisfying scheme in their business and that is ‘Pay Only For What You Use’.
No Minimum Fee
: Amazon does not charge you a minimum fee; there is a AWS simple calculator for doing monthly calculations, which helps you in estimating monthly bills.
The prices are listed according to the regional instances that are running for you.
In Amazon EC2 instance purchasing options, you can get a very detailed description and comparison between the On-Demand Instances, Spot Instances, and Reserved Instances.
Free Tier:
The Free Tier facility which is a subsystem of AWS’s Free Usage Tier allows new customers to get going with the Amazon EC2 at no cost. When new customers sign up for AWS then they receive some features each month for full one year, which are as follows –
• EC2 running on Linux or Unix Micros Instances with 750 hours of usage,
• Elastic Load Balancing with 750 hours of usage and data processing of 15GB,
• Amazon Elastic Block Storage or EBS comes with 10GB of usage,
• IOS in 1 million units,
• Snapshot Storage of 1GB,
• Snap shot Get Request for 10000 snaps,
• 1000 snap shot Put Requests, and
• In & Out Bandwidth of 15 GB combined across entire AWS services.
On-Demand Instances:
In case of On-Demand Instances, you pay for the computed capacities of the hour and that to without any long term commitments.
The costs and complexity hassles are wiped out from you at the time of planning, maintaining hardware and transforms and even purchasing them, resulting in smaller and variable cost rather than heavy and bulky amounts.
How Much Does It Really Cost:
To give you a brief idea about the pricing, you pay $0.085 per hour for Linux, and $0.12 per hour for Windows packages, and the rates increase, and go as high as $2.00 per hour for Linux, and $2.48 per hour for Quadruple Extra Large instances.
Early on, there were several complaints about the data capacity issues, but Amazon has been able to encounter them successfully within a fairly short span of time.
Reserved Instances:
In the case of Reserved Instances, you get one-time payment option and that is very low for each instance, which you’d like to reserve. What’s more, you can get hourly discounts also.
So, I personally feel the
Amazon cloud computing pricing is really competitive
, though the pricing for Quadruple Extra Large and couple of other packages are on the higher side.
And, how about you – the existing Amazon EC2 users, and potential customers?