I ran a  m2.2xlarge for some periodic processing. My last major
invoice was from January

$1.020 per High Memory Two Extra Large (m2.2xlarge) Windows
instance-hour (or partial hour) * 335 = $341

It had 34 gb of ram and 4 cores. It was enough for what I was doing.
Being on windows was nice too so I could just RDP (remote desktop) in
and not mess around with XWindows

Do you need the extra RAM and extra cores? I was mostly using 2 cores
since R / J are single threaded. I did have a routine where I spun up
8 instances to process chunks of 57 billion rows of data. I may have
switched the instance type for the job.

It's fairly easy to re-provision your image on a different instance
type when things get real heavy and run a more moderate instance type
for regular processing.

Here's the actual charges. I agree that Amazon sometimes feels a bit
difficult to determine what you'll actually pay:
http://pasteboard.co/2q7Mxjvx.png

On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 2:55 AM, Raul Miller <[email protected]> wrote:
> Ick. Actually it looks more like a dollar an hour.
>
> Still cheap, but not as cheap as the pricing page indicated. There's many
> billing options and it actually costs quite a lot to study them (in terms
> of people time).
>
> Hmm...
>
> --
> Raul
>
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 2:48 AM, Raul Miller <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> An m2.4xlarge EC2 machine running linux currently costs $0.0712 per hour.
>> This has 64 gigabytes of ram, which makes for a fairly capable J platform.
>>
>> Note also that if you install x windows on your local computer (it's a
>> free part of cygwin if you are running windows), you can run jqt on the
>> linux machine and it looks just like it's running as an application on your
>> windows machine (albeit with occasional network issues).
>>
>> Now, it is true that that kind of money adds up, and you are taxed on your
>> income also. But for some tasks it's worth spinning up a machine like this
>> - if you value your time at minimum wage, your big cost here is mostly
>> trying it out for the first time. Once you are set up, if you value your
>> time at minimum wage, it would take quite a lot of computation to add up to
>> the cost of an hour of your own time.
>>
>> (That said, some things do take quite a lot of computation...)
>>
>> Note that you do need to be able to set up ssh and xwindows, though, to
>> make this work. (ssh has a feature which supports tunneling of xwindows
>> traffic. xwindows is a gui designed back in the "bad old days" which was
>> designed to let your graphics come from a different machine than your local
>> one. (At one point it looked like the advancement of game systems would
>> make that practice obsolete, but that was assuming that prices would make
>> sense, and they do not.)
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> --
>> Raul
>>
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