EC2 Micro Instance announced by Amazon

Amazon announced today launch of  “Micro”  instance.  As per AWS team, this is to  fulfill the needs of customers who have asked   for a lower priced instance type that could satisfy the needs of their less demanding applications. Micro instances are optimized for applications that require lower throughput, but which still may consume significant compute cycles periodically. Micro instances provide a small amount of consistent CPU resources, and also allow you to burst CPU capacity when additional cycles are available. Specifications for micro are as follows,

Instance Type:      t1.micro

Memory:     613 MB

Processing Power :      Small Amount of Consistent CPU.  Up to 2 EC2 Computing Units (for short periodic bursts)

Storage :                 Elastic Block Storage (EBS) alone.

Cost: $0.02 per instance hour for linux/unix usage,  $0.03 for windows usage

Cost Comparison :  Small vs Micro

Amazon small instances costs 0.085 USD per instance-hour.  The new Micro instance  costs 0.02 USD per instance-hour.  Its a great cost saving for someone who is evaluating amazon ec2 cloud technologies for educational, technical evaluation purposes, or to run low

resource intensive  specialized  applications.  For someone who is considering running specialized applications  for long term, Micro Reserved instance would save great deal of cost on top of this.



Positives

• Inexpensive
• Good  for  EC2 evaluations, educational purposes
• Good for Low bandwidth/processing appliances such as dns servers, load balancers,  network appliances
• Good for Low traffic websites. Better than opting for a shared web  hosting plan

Negatives

• Supports EBS  (Elastic Block Storage)  only.  This is a disadvantage as you’ll have to shell extra for the storage
• Burstable processing power may be inadequate for running a medium traffic applications which need consistent performance. Rackspace small instance, which costs lesser than  ec2 micro,  is comparatively faster with respect to processor speed according to some  benchmarks available.

EC2 Micro instance is a good news  for the one’s who have been waiting for a low cost, low powered instance to get started with and run small applications and scale up as and when needed.  Also useful for startups which are cash strapped to get online with their apps quickly. However, one should also evaluate other cloud providers such as Rackspace before making a choice.