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
- Amazon EC2 Small vs Micro Cost Comparison
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.
