Amazon has unveiled a brand new AWS pricing calculator that supports price estimates for EC2 instances, EBS volumes, and a wide variety of purchasing models, with plans to add support for more services “as quickly as possible”.
The calculator, currently in beta testing mode, can be found here.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) meanwhile provides persistent block storage volumes (essentially flexible cloud-based data storage).
Saying a 10-year-old post on the calculator still regularly shows up as the cloud computing provider’s most-read blog, AWS “chief evangelist” Jeff Barr said the upgraded tool was designed to male calculations “obvious, transparent, and accessible.
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Users can make calculations by vCPU count, memory size, on-demand instances or standard reserved instances and set them by geographical location.
AWS Pricing Calculator: The Options (in Beta)
Jeff Barr wrote: “There are a couple of things to keep in mind when you make a quick estimate”
Instance Type – There are two options for users when it comes to choosing EC2 instance types; they can enter their resource requirements (vCPU count, memory size, and GPU count) and have the calculator choose the option with the lowest price, or pick an EC2 instance type by name.
Pricing Strategy – Users can choose to use On-Demand Instances, Convertible Reserved Instances, or Standard Reserved Instances, and can choose payment terms and options for Reserved Instances (a billing discount applied to the use of particular instances in your account).
EBS Volumes – Users can choose the type and size of an EBS volume for the instance. Right now, the calculator allows you to associate one volume with each EC2 instance.
If you need more than one, specify the total amount of storage you need across all volumes.
Details – Users can expand the Show calculation section to see the calculation
*Editor’s note: the title image does not show AWS’s pricing calculator (which is a little grey to make a good illustration). Alluring though a steampunk version may have been to Amazon, this is in fact Kev Stenning’s Steampunk Nixie clock, from UK design house http://www.rapido3d.co.uk/
