Amazon is introducing a new level of pricing for low demand computing. A standard Amazon Linux virtual computer ("instance") is $0.85/hr. Now that may seem inexpensive, but doing the math for a 30 day month, it would cost 30*24*.085 = $61.20/month. You can buy a lot cheaper hosting service for 1/4 of that.
This high price has lead folks to write scripts to bring up/tear down instances so that they only exist for the time you actually compute on them. But this is a pain, you have to upload any data unique to your computation, and configure in any code you need. Hacks such as storing the instance on the web (Amazon's S3 storage for example) so that the upload is a lot faster reduces the pain a bit but is still arduous.
So the new "micro instances" cost 30*24*0.02 = 14.40/month .. or your basic hosting service price! Now these are pretty tiny .. 613MB, but it just might be OK for those cases where your hosting service constraints get in the way. One example is the new node.js work, part of mobile agents. It compiles on our laptops, but not on all hosting services (yet). But it would work fine on a micro instance, at least in theory.
-- Owen
On Sep 9, 2010, at 2:23 AM, Amazon Web Services wrote:
> Dear Amazon EC2 Customer,
>
> We are excited to announce the immediate availability of Micro instances for Amazon EC2, a new, low cost instance type designed for lower throughput applications and web sites.
>
> Micro instances provide 613 MB of memory and support 32-bit and 64-bit platforms on both Linux and Windows. Micro instance pricing for On-Demand instances starts at $0.02 per hour for Linux and $0.03 per hour for Windows.
>
> Customers have asked us 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.
>
> Micro instances are available immediately in all regions, and we invite you to go and try one out for yourself today! Learn more about Amazon EC2's new Micro instances at
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> The Amazon EC2 Team
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