Cloud Exchange: AWS Spot Prices, Visualized

A screen shot of Cloud Exchange, which displays dynamic pricing for Amazon Web Services.

Earlier this week Amazon Web Services announced Spot Instances, which allows customers to buy computing power on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform based on fluctuations in price. This dynamic pricing allows customers to save money by running applications when prices fall below a designated level, or outbid other customers for available capacity. How can you take advantage of these pricing trends?

Cloud Exchange provides a visual interface for the spot pricing data Amazon is making available to developers. The app was developed by Tim Lossen (who has made the code available via GitHub) and graphs pricing data on different instance types in three availability zones. We found this site via Matt Sherman, who argues that pricing is Amazon’s core competency.

Here are a couple of additional resources and data points regarding Amazon Web Services:

• Ryan Kearney’s post on Comparing CDN Performance that looks at how Amazon CloudFront’s content delivery performance compares to similar offerings from Rackspace, Go Grid and Simple CDN.
• Amazon’s CloudFront began offering streaming video, a development that CDN analyst Dan Rayburn predicts will disrupt the market for content delivery. “While I don’t see Amazon changing the CDN landscape over night, they are already starting to have an impact on the market and as they continue to add more functionality to CloudFront, their impact will only continue to grow,” Dan writes.  
• Guy Rosen at Jack of All Clouds has an early analysis of adoption of the new West Coast availability zone on EC2 with existing zones for the East Coast and Europe.  

RELATED POSTS:

• New From Amazon: Spot Pricing on Cloud Computing
• Roundup: Amazon’s CloudFront CDN
• Cogent Slashes Bandwidth Prices
• Amazon Cuts Data Transfer Prices on EC2 and S3
• Prices for Cabinets, Space Trending Higher

About Rich Miller

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.