New Medium Instance, 64-bit bit Ubiquity, SSH Client

64-bit small instances are perhaps the best new announcement. We now have two different builds and AMI's for all our different node types, just so that we can use a small instance when necessary and a large instance otherwise. We can now drop half of our images and use 64-bit everywhere.

The medium instances are also very welcome, since previously the gap between small and large was quite big (4x the memory for 4x the price).

We have most of our workload running on Rackspace Cloud Servers (UK) and the more improvements AWS make, the more overpriced and ridiculously underperforming the Rackspace offer becomes:

Underperforming: I don't get why the bigger Rackspace Cloud Servers don't get more CPU cores, just a bigger share of the original 4 cores on the host server. This might look fine but at the end I just want more processes (PHP threads) running at the same time.

Overpriced: The pricing is really high for Cloud Servers. I'm paying around £460 a month for a 16GB RAM Cloud Server (4 cores, 620GB (!) disk). For around €448 I have a Rackspace dedicated server with 48GB RAM, 2 x 6 (modern) cores and a 480GB RAID10 array.

I'm actually switching most of our workload to dedicated hardware, it's less cool but it's just cheaper and faster, in this case.

NB: We tried AWS but the MySQL IO performance, either in EC2+EBS or RDS, was not enough for us.

Also: the MindTerm Java SSH client!

I can't think of too many cases in which I'd have my private key but no terminal to SSH from, but I like having this option.

(Takes me back to bygone days of serving up MindTerm from my home computer over dyndns, a convenient way to do what I needed to do from restrictive school machines... Anyone else do that?)

This is exactly what I needed.

I'm currently using the Rackspace VM that gives 4gb of ram. I wanted to switch to EC2 after they dropped prices, but I would have either had to drop down to a small (1.7gb - not an option for my workload) or up to a large (7gb - costs over $50/mo more).

With all of these improvements Amazon is making, Rackspace's VM offerings are now horribly overpriced.

These are welcome changes, but I really, really wish that new medium instance had 2 or 4 cores. I would pay a bit more for that, and having a single core is where many of our workloads really start to feel the pain, but we don't need all of the power (or cost) or a large instance.

I understand the economics though - cores definitely cost a lot more than memory, so perhaps its just wishful thinking.

EDIT: I should clarify - I know they already have the "High CPU Medium", but it would be nice to have a step between that and the Large instance type that had two cores, but slightly more memory.

This is a great news. Before that, if you start with a small instance, there is no way to upgrade to higher instance since they exclusively support 64-bit. Now you can upgrade smoothly from micro to any instance.

Go 64-bit!

A medium instance is actually a very nice option for small deployments.

Micro instances are throttled -http://gregsramblings.com/2011/02/07/amazon-ec2-micro-instan.... I, personally, do not maintain any 32-bit AMIs. The offer gap between a micro and a large instance for 64 was large enough for me to feel it.

This is excellent, I was just complaining about the 32-bit-only medium high-cpu instance types yesterday. Now I just wish they'd add another mid-range instance with ~3.75 GB RAM and 2x2=4 or 2x2.5=5 CPU. Basically combine the higher resources from each of the medium types.

Typo in title: "64-bit bit Ubiquity"

Other than that, exciting news. EC2 has always been about being able to choose a fitting solution for your particular needs, and this fills a niche.

It's weird that they would introduce the Medium instance as "new", when it's actually a return -- they used to have Medium instances a couple years ago, and retired them.

The first two changes feel related. What change do you suppose they made to their infrastructure that has enabled these features?