I wrote about a Brief History of Cloud CPU Costs and predicted Amazon would announce a new price cutting scheme soon. Today (Dec 2, 2011) they did tell us about a new way for “heavy cloud users” to save up to an additional 9% on EC2 costs.
Amazon announced two new Reserved Instance (RI) pricing tiers. “Just in time for the holidays,” Amazon gifts to us cloud companies two additional ways to save money on our cloud CPU costs.
The existing RI pricing model is now called the “Medium Tier” and is complimented with the new tiers “light usage” and “heavy usage” tiers. Read more about this update on the Amazon EC2 price page.
Heavy usage will save an additional 9% compared to the newly renamed medium tier. Nine percent is a nice gift when no coding is involved to realize the savings.
The savings are incremental, but add up over time when you can implement a “cloud orientated architecture” to “game the cloud.”
