New c3.* Instance Types on Amazon EC2 - Nice!

Worth switching.

Amazon shared that the new c3.* instance types have been in high demand on EC2 since they were released.

I finally had a minute to take a look at the specs for the c3.* instances which were just announced at AWS re:Invent, and it is obvious why they are popular and why they should probably be even more popular than they are.

Let’s just take a look at the cheapest of these, the c3.large, and compare it to the older generation c1.medium, which is similar in price:

c1.medium c3.large difference
Virtual Cores 2 2
Core Speed 2.5 3.5 +40%
Effective Compute Units 5 7 +40%
Memory 1.7 GB 3.75 GB +120%
Ephemeral Storage 350 GB 32 GB SSD -90%, but much faster
Hourly on-demand Cost (us-east-1) $0.145 $0.15 +3.4%

To summarize:

The c3.large is 40% faster and has more than double the memory than the c1.medium but costs about the same!

In fact, you only pay 12 cents more per day in us-east-1 for the much better c3.large.

I have been a fan of c1.medium for years, but there does not appear to be any reason to use it any more. I’m moving mine to c3.large.

If Amazon does not drastically drop the price on the c1.medium, then it would look like they might be trying to move folks off of the previous generation so that they can retire old hardware and make room in their data centers for newer, faster hardware.

While we’re at it, here’s a comparison of the old c1.xlarge with the new c3.2xlarge which are also about the same cost with similar benefits for switching:

c1.xlarge c3.2xlarge difference
Virtual Cores 8 8
Core Speed 2.5 3.5 +40%
Effective Compute Units 20 28 +40%
Memory 7 GB 15 GB +114%
Ephemeral Storage 1680 GB 160 GB SSD -90%, but much faster
Hourly on-demand Cost (us-east-1) $0.58 $0.60 +3.4%

In completely unrelated news… I’m selling some c1.medium Reserved Instances on the Reserved Instance Marketplace in case anybody is interested in buying them.