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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

I'm blown away. This radically changes the cost for one of my core products (automated browsing from EC2 machines). I've thought for a long time that EC2 was getting comparatively very expensive for bandwidth (simply not decreasing their prices). I thought they would have to change it, but I didn't expect free!

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I wouldn't be surprised if they put a fair use clause somewhere. Otherwise you could hypothetically run a fairly resource intensive bot that scrapes data 24x7 using up aws download bw for no cost.

I don't think AWS needs a fair use clause, because their cost for incoming bandwidth is virtually zero (since they have to buy symmetric connections) and if you're sucking in a lot of data you're probably paying them a reasonable amount to store it, process it, or both.

Instances are already IO bound/capped.

For example, if you start up a micro instance, you'll only be able to download at like 200kbps or something.

So I'd assume the connection speed is linked to the size of the instance, and the bandwidth cost is integrated into that cost somewhat.

I don't think this is accurate. I have seen download speeds of around 6/8MBps on windows micro instances. The lowest I got was around 3MBps. But I only tried with downloads of around 30MB files at the maximum.

This

  wget -O /dev/null http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test

gives me about 30 MBytes/s from a micro instance in EU-West

Sorry yeah it looks like my test was disk IO bound rather than network bound.

The io is burstable. Try doing a sustained large download and you will see the speed throttle down

No, I'm seeing a sustained 6MB/s on this US-EAST micro.

any more info on this? I had no idea this was the case

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