EC2’s M3 Instances Go Global; Reduced EC2 Charges and Lower Bandwidth Prices

We continue to work to make AWS more powerful and less expensive, and to pass the savings on to you. To that end, I have three important announcements:

• EC2’s M3 instance family is now available in all AWS Regions including AWS GovCloud (US).
• On-Demand prices for EC2 instances in the M1, M2, M3, and C1 families have been lowered.
• Prices for data transfer between AWS Regions have also been lowered.

M3 Global Rollout
We launched the M3 family of EC2 instances last fall, with initial availability in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region. Also known as the Second Generation Standard Instances, members of the M3 family (Extra Large and Double Extra Large) feature up to 50% higher absolute CPU performance than their predecessors. All instances are 64-bit and are optimized for applications such as media encoding, batch processing, caching, and web serving.

I’m pleased to announce that you can now launch M3 instances in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), AWS GovCloud (US), Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) Regions. We plan to make the M3 instances available in the South America (Brazil) Region in the coming weeks.

On-Demand Price Reduction
We are reducing the price of On-Demand Amazon EC2 instances running Linux world-wide, effective February 1, 2013.

This reduction applies to all members of the M1 (First Generation Standard), M2 (High Memory), M3 (Second Generation Standard), and C1 (High-CPU) families. The size of the reductions vary, but generally average 10-20%. Here are the reductions, by family and by Region:

Pricing for the M3 instances in the Regions where they are newly available already reflect the economies of scale that allowed us to make the reductions that we are announcing today.

As usual, your AWS bill will automatically reflect the lower prices.

Regional Data Transfer Price Reduction
With nine AWS Regions in operation (and more in the works), you can already build global applications that have a presence in two or more Regions.

Previously, we have charged normal internet bandwidth prices for data transfer between Regions. In order to make this increasingly common scenario even more cost-effective, we are significantly lowering the cost of transferring data between AWS Regions (by 26% to 83%), effective February 1, 2013. You can already transfer data into a Region at no charge ($0.00 / Gigabyte); this price reduction applies to data leaving one Region for another Region.

Here are the details:

This pricing applies to data transferred out of Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets, and Amazon Glacier vaults.

The new pricing also applies to CloudFront origin fetches. In other words, the cost to use CloudFront in conjunction with static data stored in S3 or dynamic data coming from EC2 will decline as a result of this announcement. This is an important aspect of AWS — the services become an even better value when used together.

Let’s work through an example to see what this means in practice. Suppose you are delivering 100 TB of content per month to your users, with a 10% cache miss rate (90% of the requests are delivered from a cached copy in a CloudFront edge location), and that this content comes from the Standard or Europe (Ireland) Amazon S3 Region. The cost of your origin fetches (from CloudFront to S3) will drop from $1,228.68 to $204.80, an 83% reduction.

Again, your next AWS bill will reflect the lower prices. You need not do anything to benefit.

— Jeff;