Amazon Web Services introduces ‘low-cost’ general purpose instance type for Amazon EC2

Amazon Web Services, Inc. has announced the availability of T2 instances, a new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance type designed to dramatically reduce costs for applications that do not require sustained high CPU performance but benefit from the ability to burst to full core performance. With On-Demand Instance prices starting at $0.013 per hour ($9.50 per month), T2 instances are the lowest-cost Amazon EC2 instance option and are ideal for web servers, developer environments, and small databases. When used with Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) General Purpose (SSD) volumes, T2 instances also bring high-performance storage options to customers at a very low cost.

“Amazon EC2 provides an unmatched selection of instances to support customers running whatever workload they want on AWS. Some of our customers have requested instance types that optimize their performance and cost for applications that don’t use the full CPU capability frequently, but require the full CPU resources for short bursts,” said Matt Garman, Vice President, Amazon EC2 at Amazon Web Services. “T2 instances address this need by providing a consistent baseline performance with the ability to burst to full CPU core performance – all at a very low cost.”

225am.com is endeavoring to help students through the job acquisition process with a new CRM-like web application. “Our infrastructure needs are very basic at this stage of the company. We are hosting a landing page and a product demonstration for talking to potential customers and investors,” said Jim Medalia, Founder, 225am.com. “T2 instances will enable us to significantly reduce our out-of-pocket expenses for prototyping and demonstration. With T2 instances we are able to get the performance we need, when we need it, and we know that our costs will remain extremely low. Overall, it’s just a great fit for us.”

Engine Yard is the leading cloud application management platform empowering developers and DevOps to provision, manage, and monitor applications in the cloud. “Customers deploy critical production applications on Engine Yard. The prototyping and staging environments required to support these applications typically run 24/7 and can be underutilized when not handling a production request load,” said Rob Walters, CTO, Engine Yard. “Customers can run T2 instances on our cloud platform to reduce their infrastructure costs and increase performance. This enables them to launch new applications easily and helps them grow their businesses.”

inPowered is a platform that helps marketers connect consumers with expert opinions about their brands and products. “At inPowered, we help Fortune 500 brands discover and amplify trusted content from experts to help people fall in love with their brands,” said Pirouz Nilforoush, Co-Founder and President, inPowered. “We use Amazon EC2 to host our platform, which is a distributed and scalable system that can continuously parse millions of Internet-based articles over a short period of time. We require lots of small Amazon EC2 instances to gather and analyze expert content, with only short bursts of CPU needed. T2 instances allow us to substantially reduce costs, improve performance, and scale our platform to accommodate the significant growth in our customer base.”

Red 5 Studios is dedicated to bringing together millions of gamers across the world by creating immersive worlds, intriguing stories, and compelling characters. “We use AWS on our production servers for the massively multiplayer online (MMO) game Firefall,” said Jeffrey Berube, Director of Technical Operations, Red 5 Studios. “Internally, we have dozens of lightweight internal tools including project management and front-end interfaces for analyzing the massive amounts of data produced by our platform. These tools are cost centers for us, and they are typically idle until someone is using then to run queries or do updates. Historically we’ve used the m1.small instance type. Transitioning to T2 instances provide us with a higher-performance, lower-cost instance well suited for these workloads. We are re-evaluating the resource utilization of our fleet to see where we can use more of them.”

Customers can launch T2 instances using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS SDKs, AWS Marketplace, and third-party libraries. T2 instances are available in three instance sizes and are initially available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Australia (Sydney), and Brazil (Sao Paulo) Regions. T2 instances can be purchased as On-Demand and Reserved Instances.