On: Low Cost EC2 Instances With Burstable Performance

[aurelianito]

I thought that cost was dominated by memory utilization instead of CPU utilization. How can AWS manage to pull this off?

[jewel → aurelianito]

That was my understanding too. At $9.50/mo, a server with 96GB of RAM would bring in $912/mo.

A quick click around dell finds that a mid-range 1U rackmount server (R320) with that much RAM costs $3,135.

So a back-of-the-envelope calculation makes it seem workable, especially for high-RAM low-CPU configurations, which is what this is.

There are other tricks that they might be employing, such as swapping out part of RAM to SSDs behind the scenes, as well as compressing RAM contents. On low-load servers like these, typical usage would imply that RAM would be mostly static.

[wmf → aurelianito]

These instances have almost no memory. A physical server has 16GB/core and it looks like Amazon is putting 10 1GB instances on each core.