New low cost AWS EC2 T2 instances

http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/low-cost-burstable-ec2-instances/

Amazon AWS has unveiled a cheaper EC2 instance type, T2 instance, that's geared for running small workloads at low cost. Crucially, it can temporarily ramp up compute performance when it's really needed. This would be good for dev environments, low-traffic web sites and small databases — or any application marked by periods of low CPU use interrupted by high-usage spikes, according to Amazon.

The instances allow users to run single or dual CPU virtual machines (VMs) on shared hardware powered by 3.3GHz Xeon processors; these VMs automatically increase performance by redeeming banked "CPU Credits", which grant access to more compute oomph for one-minute bursts.

Here are the specs (prices are for On-Demand Instances in Sydney region:

Name	vCPUs	Baseline Performance	RAM (GiB)	CPU Credits / Hour	Price / Hour	Price / Month
t2.micro	1	10%	1.0	6	$0.002	$14.40
t2.small	1	20%	2.0	12	$0.04	$28.80
t2.medium	2	40%	4.0	24	$0.08	$57.60

Since most systems don't have a consistently high load profile, it makes a lot of sense for a lot of users in theory. The new T2 options sound good: from the blog post description, it's much less abrupt throttling than t1.micro, which should make it much more flexible. This is similar to Google Cloud where credits kick in automatically as needed.