I am writing a work about cloud computing and I have been searching in google and in google scholars for a good explanation about the price-setting mechanism of Amazon, and I have not found any.
Amazon uses a price-setting mechanism which sets the current price for the resource based on market conditions, user demand, and current level of utilization of the resource. How does this price setting mechanism works? Is there any price function that I can have as a reference?
Thanks in advance.
Check out:
Deconstructing Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Pricing - Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda
http://www.haifux.org/lectures/264/
The current pricing of amazon EC2 is listed in this page:
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
The pricing has not changed for 11 months, so I do not think there is an automated price-setting mechanism. I am also unable to find any results about EC2's price setting mechanism.
Presumably you are talking about the spot pricing (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot-instances/). As far as I know, the function that relates supply and demand to the spot price is not public.
Related
Luis is no longer free ?
I didn't open LUIS dashboard for 10-11 days. I'm seeing this now. They changed a lot of things there.
I must get azure key to get my LUIS app works ?
According to the pricing details, LUIS is not free. You are able to make 10K calls per month without charge, after which you are charged $0.75 per 1000 calls. Without more detail I am unsure of your second question. An azure key may be used to link LUIS to your bot.
Just to clarify LUIS has the same model as before, the new portal just highlights this information in a different way that's a little more confusing (we're working on it).
No Azure Account; free for 1000 requests/month using programmatic api key
With Azure, free for 10,000 requests per month (F0 plan in Azure)
With Azure, $.75/1000 calls
The thing that's new and confusing is the programmatic key with the low quota isn't connected to your app by default. We're going to fix that shortly.
Same happened to me. I had to create LUIS app in Azure and then provide key to LUIS application on LUIS.ai. But in LUIS app on azure, you can select the pricing tier as free if 10k calls per month suffice your application usage or choose paid plan according to need.
A start-key is default available with each LUIS model which can be used upto 10k calls per month
LUIS is free for Testing and Educational use. It is about 10000 conversations per month. However in production environment it has to be paid.
The important this is you can access LUIS feature via Azure or can independently integrate it into your application. The method of costing will depend on that as well.
I currently try to implement amazon ec2 and I read that after one year they charge you. I used google app engine before(using java) and there is the feature that you can enable/disable charging. I just want to try the free ec2 instance, so here are my questions:
Does Amazon EC2 AUTOMATICALLY charge you after one year?
How to disable the automatically charging function?
I ended up closing my account by visiting the account page
At the bottom of the page you will find "close account"
It is currently not possible to disable charging. You might need to go over the free tier (for example if you setup a production environment, you might not want it to be killed automatically by amazon). Google App engine is a bit different because it is free if you have zero http requests, so it will just stop serving your app.
If you delete your credit card on your account, amazon will still charge it if there is an unpaid balance.
Amazon will not remind you that you will go over your free tier, so I would recommend to put a little reminder in one year on your calendar in one year to not forget to shutdown your server.
There is no way to control how much you will have to pay on AWS, that's why I wouldn't use it.
Amazon is really vague on the free tier (for instance it's not very clear whether the storage volume comes with the instance is counted against free EB2 storage quota). There are so many ways you can get a bill for using the free tier.
Yes you will be billed after 12 months, if you don't terminate all the instances and detach all storage volumes.
So many people have complained about Amazon's billing practice. Amazon has never changed. I guess this is the way Amazon decided to make $. Let you in for "free" but you will most likely accidentally spend some money. If you decide to use it, you won't know how much you will have to pay. If you have the capability to use colo/dedicated server, you might find out it's actually so much cheaper to go with a fixed monthly payment instead of billing based on usage.
With Amazon EC2, you are billed per hour of usage. If you are a new user, your account is credited with something like 8,760 free hours (24*365) which expire after 1 year. (I'm working from fuzzy memory here, so double-check the official terms instead of taking my word for it.)
After your free hours expire or are otherwise used up, Amazon EC2 will begin billing for normal hours (which can be as cheap as 2 cents per hour -- http://ec2instances.info). There is no such thing as a "free" EC2 instance.
So, to answer your questions:
Does Amazon EC2 AUTOMATICALLY charge you after one year?
Once your free hours are used up or expire, then you are automatically billed for normal hourly usage.
How to disable the automatically charging function?
You can't. All EC2 instances cost money. You are responsible for keeping an eye on your account and ensuring that you don't go over your free hours if you don't want to pay anything.
I was charged for a service that practically i never used.
a) Its true that Amazon never told you that the free tier is done. However, Amazon is prompty to charges you. Its my mistake but i admit that a little advice doesn't hurt, specially since practicaly everybody do that.
b) Even for a free tier, i wasn't impressed with the performance. I am owned a shared-hosting that are more powerful.
c) As some comments said, you can't delete your credit card, neither you can cancels the service. Its really low.
d) Finally,as some comment said, i closed my account. As far i can remember, its not tied with your Amazon (not cloud) account.
The service its so convoluted and overly complex, its filled with paid-traps and i am not impressed at all. Thanks Amazon but not thanks, i will stick with VPS/Dedicated.
You get 1 year of free usage http://aws.amazon.com/free/ .
Try reading AWS Free Usage Tier: http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-Guide-Usage-ebook/dp/B007Q4JESC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343213452&sr=8-1&keywords=aws+free+tier .
We have a fairly large member site set up on AWS using a medium high-CPU server. Most of the time it runs at very low capacity (~3%), but once a week we send out a newsletter to our members with opportunities. In the minutes after the newsletter the server load shoots up (sometimes to over 100%) with members trying to access the site.
In the long term, we will be restructuring the system, but for now, I'd like to add an overflow server that will serve a 'try back in a few minutes' page to users while this is occurring.
I haven't been able to find any good how-tos on setting up routing for this type of thing. Any ideas?
Thanks!
Why not use Elastic Load Balancing along with Auto Scaling instead?
That would allow you to match the number of servers to your actual usage. Most of the week, you would not be paying for 97% unused capacity, and during the newsletter periods, you will have enough capacity for everyone to log on and buy something from you.
There is a post on the Amazon Web Services blog that explains how to do this. It puts failover web page on S3, which is easy to maintain and cheap.
Create a Backup Website Using Route 53 DNS Failover and S3 Website Hosting
I just found out about amazon EC2. I am wondering what it actually offers. I use to go with VPS servers and now I want to learn if EC2 give me the same options as a VPS with some host company.
Are there any limitations on what I can install?
Thanks
Cristian
Probably the main difference between EC2 and a conventional VPS hosting service is the pricing model. EC2 charges for CPU time (and other resources) by the hour, whereas many conventional services charge by the month (or greater). The best way to learn about EC2 would be to jump into the documentation, and then sign up for the free usage tier.
Within reason, there are no limitations on what you can install.
Is it possible to have multiple users to manage an Amazon EC2 environment? I want to give access to several additional people to create machines on my existing billing account.
Amazon just announced AWS Identity and Access Management - http://aws.amazon.com/iam/
As of right now, it's in 'preview' mode, but this will allow you to have multiple AWS management accounts.
A few months ago Amazon announced Consolidated Billing. I never used it, but I think that is what you're looking for:
Consolidated Billing enables you to see a combined view of AWS costs incurred by all accounts in your department or company, as well as obtain a detailed cost report for each individual AWS account associated with your paying account. Consolidated Billing may also lower your overall costs since the rolled up usage across all of your accounts could help you reach lower-priced volume tiers more quickly.
Consolidated Billing Guide
This is absolutely possible using IAM service of AWS. With the help of IAM you can create users and give them specific permissions on various services of amazon.
You can try http://LabSlice.com. It's primarily for Virtual Lab Management (ie. playground environments), but may suit your needs.