Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 5.6:
Instance types and prices
Instances
Description
Family:
Standard
Type:
Small Instance
Price: $0.10 per instance hour
1.7 GB memory
1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute
Unit)
160 GB instance storage (150 GB plus 10 GB root partition)
32-bit platform
I/O Performance: Moderate
Family:
Standard
Type:
Large Instance
Price: $0.40 per instance hour
7.5 GB memory
4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute
Units each)
850 GB instance storage (2×420 GB plus 10 GB root parti-
tion)
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
Family:
Standard
Type:
Extra Large Instance
Price: $0.80 per instance hour
15 GB memory
8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute
Units each)
1,690 GB instance storage (4×420 GB plus 10 GB root parti-
tion)
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
Family:
High-CPU
Type:
High-CPU Medium
Instance
Price: $0.20 per instance hour
1.7 GB of memory
5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2
Compute Units each)
350 GB of instance storage
32-bit platform
I/O Performance: Moderate
Family:
High-CPU
Type:
High-CPU Extra Large
Instance
Price: $0.80 per instance hour
7 GB of memory
20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2
Compute Units each)
1690 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
Amazon clearly belongs to business case 5. It offers computing resources to its
clients and enjoys revenue from renting its own infrastructure. Clients of Amazon
can be any individual or company that needs more storage or CPU, especially if
needs may change dynamically. The business model that Amazon is following
in this specific example is IaaS since it provides Infrastructure as a Service to its
customers.
As we mentioned before, Amazon's customers could be any individual or
company that needs to use storage or CPU without provisioning its own computing
resources either because of the capital cost or because of dynamically changing
demand. In the following paragraphs we will present such a customer of Amazon's
web services S3 and EC2.
The New York Times (NYT) recently decided to make available to the public
all the newspapers that have been published from 1852 to 1922 online. They called
