Amazon Web Services continues to amaze with important innovations. We record at least 4 new features per month, including new features, new services, reductions in service costs, or geographic expansions of Amazon’s datacenters.
Since March, in the area of the costs of its services alone, it has published several new features:
- 10% to 42% reduction in the cost of reserved instances on EC2,RDS,ElastiCache, 19th unilateral cost reduction announcement from AWS
- the ability to activate alarms on billing, to be alerted when thresholds are exceeded
- the functionality to schedule CSV exports of cost reports
- The ability to use spot instances in autoscaling and cloudformation
Already with reserved instances the cost of computing can be reduced up to 71% of the nominal cost onDemand, now with the use of spot instances it is possible to substantially reduce the computing costs deriving from self-scaling systems.
Unfortunately for us, this news, if on the one hand confirms our knowledge and perception of the market and its needs, on the other hand forces us to cancel and modify some of our business plans relating to some value-added services that we had planned to release to our customers in the very short term. In particular, we had been planning for more than a year to replace spot instances in the current AWS scalability system and we were integrating it into the simplification interfaces for customers.
With these approaches, AWS is very competitive and convenient compared to competitors and is also starting to approach the “economic” market consisting of classic hosting providers or vps hosting.