Wednesday, 19 July 2017

AWS EC2 historical pricing

I wrote a blog post in October 2014 comparing AWS and Azure pricing and from that post I have the AWS pricing for Linux instances in Sydney region in US$. I thought it would be interesting to compare historical AWS EC2 pricing to current pricing to determine the level of price reductions:
VMMonthly Cost
(On Demand)
October 2014
Monthly Cost
(On Demand)
July 2017
Price reduction
m3.medium (1 vCPU/3.75GB)$71.00$68.004.38%
r3.large (2 vCPU/15 GB)$153.00$146.004.58%
r3.xlarge (4vCPU/30.5 GB)$307.00$291.005.12%
r3.2xlarge (8 vCPU/61 GB)$614.00$583.005.12%
r3.4xlarge (16 vCPU/122 GB)$1,229.00$1,165.005.20%
r3.8xlarge (32 vCPU/244GB)$2,459.00$2,330.005.24%

I did not record all AWS EC2 instance pricing, yet it easy to get historical AWS pricing. It  is available on Internet Archive's Wayback machine:

VMMonthly Cost
(On Demand)
June 2013
Monthly Cost
(On Demand)
July 2017
Price reduction
m1.small - 1/1.7$0.080$0.05827.50%
m1.medium - 1/3.75$0.160$0.11726.88%
m1.large - 2/7.5$0.320$0.23327.19%
m1.xlarge - 4/15$0.640$0.46727.03%
m3.xlarge - 4/15$0.700$0.37246.86%
m3.2xlarge - 8/30$1.400$0.74546.79%

AWS price reductions are not significant when you consider Moore's law, for example similarly priced CPU had 93% performance increase:
Product NameStatusLaunch Date# of CoresMax Turbo FrequencyProcessor Base FrequencyCacheRecommended Customer Price
Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2658LaunchedQ1'1282.40 GHz2.10 GHz20 MB SmartCache$1,479.00
Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2660 v4LaunchedQ1'16143.20 GHz2.00 GHz35 MB$1,445.00

CPU E5-2658 launched Q1'12:


CPU E5-2660 v4 launched Q1'16:


AWS pricing is decreasing but it is not keeping up with Moore's law:

Update 25/4/2019 - No reduction in prices since July 2017:
I am so surprised, on instances that I sampled on October 2014 and July 2017 AWS did not offer and price reduction...for these EC2 instances they have the same price in April 2019:
VMMonthly Cost
(On Demand)
July 2017
Monthly Cost
(On Demand)
April 2019
Price reduction
(July 2017 to     
 April 2019)
m3.medium (1 vCPU/3.75GB)$68.00$68.000.00%
r3.large (2 vCPU/15 GB)$146.00$146.000.00%
r3.xlarge (4vCPU/30.5 GB)$291.00$291.000.00%
r3.2xlarge (8 vCPU/61 GB)$583.00$583.000.00%
r3.4xlarge (16 vCPU/122 GB)$1,165.00$1,165.000.00%
r3.8xlarge (32 vCPU/244GB)$2,330.00$2,330.000.00%

AWS operating income is growing at a phenomenal rate and one easy way of achieve this is to no longer provide price reductions. EC2 is very profitable for Amazon!!!

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