Basics of Amazon EC2 Pricing, Regions & BaseLining

I hope you are all staying safe in this unique period of coronvirus lockdown.  To take your mind off all things viral, I'm going to talk about the basics of Amazon Web Services and a service called Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 for short.

The Amazon EC2 service offers a way of running up virtual machines in minutes.  Each virtual machine is billed per minute and you can terminate them at any time.

There are 4 flavours to choose from:

• On-Demand instances - recommended for when you are starting off with experiments where workloads may be a little unpredictable.
• Reserved Instances - recommended for stable workloads, which can be secured over a 1 to 3 year term.  These are the cheapest per second of billing.
• Spot Instances - these are instances that you can bid for, and if you are successful you get to use them for a period of time.  Perfect for time critical workloads.  
• Dedicated - a dedicated physical server, recommended for when you have to licence per server to save costs or for clear, compelling compliance reasons.  These are the most expensive per second of billing.

Check out my video below which talks through these options:

Once you have decided on your instance aligned to your commercial model, you can look at what type of instance you want and where you want to host it.  There are many locations to choose from.  Click on the image below to take you to the interactive map:

There are quite a few instances to choose from, once you know the location.  Here are the most common categories:

Once you have selected your instance category, you'll need to then pick an EC2 specification.  Don't sweat it at this stage....try out a few specs.   Measure their performance and price over a few days and then you can select the one that meets your needs.  Just be sure that when you're monitoring your EC2 instances, you are making the instances work as normal. 

We call this first set of measurements a baseline. And we can use it to measure what "normal" looks like.  Click on the link below to understand best practices around baselinining:

Deviations to this baseline can indicate abnormal activity.  Things like an unexpected peak in demand from our users, or worse still an indication of a malicious attack.  Either by a person, via a bot or via some form of malware.  

I hope you enjoyed my blog post.

Take care and stay safe.

​P