Amazon just announced two new High-CPU instance types for EC2. Here’s a quick comparison of what you can now get compared to the previous offering:
2x Small ($0.20/hr)
RAM - 3.4GB
CPU - 2 Compute Units*
DISK - 320GB
High-CPU Medium ($0.20/hr)
RAM - 1.7GB
CPU - 5 Compute Units*
DISK - 350GB

Extra Large ($0.80/hr)
RAM - 15GB
CPU - 8 Compute Units*
DISK - 1690GB
High-CPU Extra Large ($0.80/hr)
RAM - 7GB
CPU - 20 Compute Units*
DISK - 1690GB

So it really looks like a tradeoff between CPU and RAM. If you run more CPU intensive processes, then these new instance types may save you money.

*One EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor.

I recently had to alter(edit) a very large MySQL table on a production system to drop an unnecessary index. This particular table has over 15 million records in it and occupies over 6GB of space. Since this database runs the We’re Related facebook app, I couldn’t just bring it down for hours and make the change. This particular table stores data for a main part of the application.

Enter EC2. All of our production systems that power We’re Related are running on Amazon’s EC2 so this was an easy problem to work around. Using MySQL replication, I setup a system that would mirror this production database. The nice thing about replication is that it automatically keeps any mirrors up to date with the latest data.

Once I had the mirror up and running, I was able to run the command to alter the table on the mirror. This took over 6 hours to complete. Once done, it quickly caught up with those 6 hours worth of updates from the main system.

Tonight, I will be reconfiguring the webservers to connect to this new mirrored system instead of the original. This will result in less than five minutes of actual downtime.

End result:
downtime - < 5 minutes compared to 6+ hours
additional cost - $20 (for running an additional “beefy” server for 1 day)

That’s one thing I just love about EC2, you pay for what you use. If you need a temporary server for hours or days, you just fire one up and pay minimally for it.

For us UNIX fans, Sun Microsystems is working with Amazon to offer OpenSolaris on EC2.
I’m not sure how I missed it, but they made the announcement last week.

I just signed up to be included in the beta. I’ll post an update here when I get in and start tinkering. My main focus is going to be the performance of MySQL on EC2 comparing Linux with OpenSolaris.

I’m not sure what their long term plans are, but for now they aren’t incurring any extra charges (beyond the standard EC2 charges.) I know that RedHat charges extra to run their Enterprise version on EC2.

Amazon just announced a price change for bandwidth for outbound traffic from EC2 and S3. The result is up to 26% reduction in costs for all outbound traffic depending on your volume. Here are the new prices which are effective May 1

New data transfer price (effective May 1, 2008)
$0.100 per GB - data transfer in
$0.170 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.110 per GB - next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB - data transfer out / month over 150 TB

You can read full details here.

It looks like the easter bunny came a few days late for Amazon.

Yay! They finally offer static IP addresses for Amazon EC2. This is a huge step for anyone wanting to use EC2 to host anything on the internet. They are free of charge if you are using them with a running instance. If they are not associated with a running instance, there is a $0.01/hr charge for them.

This means that you won’t have to worry about updating DNS with a new IP address if for some reason your instance shuts down.

They currently have a limit of 5 IP addresses per account, but you can request more if you need them.

They also have a new thing called “Availability Zones.” This lets you put your instances (servers) in different locations allowing you some redundancy in case of some sort of failure of a location (like power failure or network problems.)