Amazon EC2 Spot Instances allow you to request spare Amazon EC2 computing capacity for up to 90 percent off the On-Demand price. Spot Instances are recommended for:. Applications that have flexible start and end times. Applications that are only feasible at very low compute prices.
Stratalux, Inc., the leading managed cloud services provider, announced today the release of its free Amazon Web Services Pricing Tool.
Amazon customers want familiar tools like Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to price, optimize and run what-if scenarios on their cloud resources.
Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB)May 07, 2013
Recognizing that pricing projects built on top of Amazon Web Services can be confusing and challenging, Stratalux today has announced the release of a free Excel spreadsheet to aid in this effort. Stratalux’s Excel spreadsheet allows users of AWS to price out, optimize and run what-if scenarios on their cloud projects.
One of the great things about Amazon’s public cloud offering is the flexibility of their solution, however this brings additional challenges when trying to price solutions. Recognizing this need Stratalux decided to make public its AWS pricing tool. “Customers are always asking what the cost implications would be if they change the size or their EC2 Instances or move from one region to another”, stated Jeremy Przygode, CEO of Stratalux. “With their needs in mind we decided to make this tool available to our customers and the broader Internet community”.
Amazon Web Services has many thousands of different pricing permutations for their services which makes pricing AWS confusing and challenging. For example the price of an m1.large instance can vary greatly depending upon which region it belongs to, what Operating System is installed, and whether or not the instance is reserved for one or three years. Additionally Amazon customers need tools that keep up with Amazon’s pricing updates and service enhancements. “Amazon has reduced its pricing as many as 26 times over the last few years. This is great for customer’s bottom line, but challenging when trying to price new solutions or understand current costs”, said Przygode. Przygode continues, “Stratalux is committed to providing regular updates to our pricing tool as Amazon changes pricing and releases new services”.
Stratalux’s AWS Pricing Tool is a compliment to Amazon’s own online calculator, but it allows users to use familiar tools like Microsoft’s Excel. “What AWS users want are familiar tools like Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to be able to budget and share the cost of their AWS projects within organizations”, states Przygode. Stratalux hopes to help alleviate some of these challenges with the release of this spreadsheet.
To download your own copy of this tool, please visit our site at http://www.stratalux.com/aws-pricing-spreadsheet
About Stratalux, Inc.
Stratalux is the leader in building and managing cloud solutions for commercial customers. Focused on building highly trafficked and fully automated website infrastructures for companies on the Internet, Stratalux leverages decades of experience from the world of traditional IT while being recognized as a leader in migrating and managing websites built on public cloud resources. Stratalux has partnered with best of breed cloud solution providers including Amazon Web Services (AWS), OpsCode’s Chef, and Rightscale, among others. Stratalux is a cloud solutions company, that has a singular focus on cloud technologies enabling its customers to focus on what’s really important; their business.
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This python script reads the worksheet of a formatted Excel workbook based on the included Hosts.xlsx spreadsheet file. The script uses the CPU, RAM, Storage, and OS values along with command line parameters to assign instance types from the General Purpose family of AWS instances. After running the script once you may assign any instance type in the 'Instance Final' column and run the script again using the -i switch with 'all' parameter to read existing instance values as input. Pricing is provided as a unit and daily cost in USD via AWS Pricing API.
Setup
To use this script you will need an AWS Account, Python, and AWS CLI.
AWS Account:
- Setup an AWS account
- Create a new user with no console access and generate an access and secret key
- Create an IAM policy named 'PricingFullAccess' using the following JSON code
- Reference: AWS Billing Permissions Example 11: Find products and prices
- Create a group named 'PricingOnly' and attach the PricingFullAccess policy
- Add the user from step 2 to the PricingOnly group to restrict access to pricing information only
Python for Windows:
- Download Python3 (https://www.python.org/downloads/)
- Install Python using the installer and check the box to add Python to PATH
- Note: You can use Python2 as the script and modules are backwards compatible
- Use PIP: Python's Package Manager to install required modules
C:>python -V
Display Python version and confirms installC:>python -m pip list
Lists installed Python modulesC:>python -m pip install argparse
Install the argparse module if not already installed by the installerC:>python -m pip install boto3
Install the AWS moduleC:>python -m pip install json
Install the json moduleC:>python -m pip install openpyxl
Install the Excel read/write module
AWS CLI for Windows:
- Download AWS CLI (https://s3.amazonaws.com/aws-cli/AWSCLI64.msi)
- Install AWS CLI using the installer
C:aws configure
Setup AWS CLI with Access and Secret key for the AWS user
- Paste in the Access and Secret keys
- Set default region to us-east-1. This region provides access to the Pricing API endpoint
- Set default output format to JSON
Python3 and AWS CLI for MacOS:
For MacOS use Homebrew to install Python3, PIP, and AWS CLI *Some of the below commands may be optional
- Install Homebrew using the following command:
/usr/bin/ruby -e '$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)'
brew list
Lists installed packagesbrew install python3
Install Python3, you should now have python 2.X that ships with MacOS and python3 installedbrew install awscli
Install AWS CLIaws --version
Verify that the AWS CLI is installed correctly- Use pip3 to install the same modules listed above in Python for Windows steps.
If command is not found in step 5 you will need to add it to the PATH.
$PATH
Check the current PATHexport PATH=/Users/USERNAME/Library/Python/3.X/bin/:$PATH
Add Python3 bin folder to PATH$PATH
Check PATH againvi .bash_profile
Add to bash profile:export PATH=~/Library/Python/3.X/bin/:$PATH
sudo vi /etc/path
Add /usr/local/sbin after /usr/local/bin
Usage
Place the aws-ec2-pricing.py script and Hosts.xlsx file in the same directory. Use the -h switch to displays help info and available options.
Assign initial instance type and price
Example: C:>python aws-ec2-pricing.py -f Hosts.xlsx -w Data -r us-west-2 -i m5 -v gp2
- The script inspects the CPU and RAM values and selects an EC2 instance from the m5 family that will support the larger of the 2 variables. As the script iterates through the rows it will convert storage from MB to GB and inspect the OS and retrieve the pricing matching the instance type, OS, storage and region.
Read instance value and update pricing
Example: C:>python aws-ec2-pricing.py -f Hosts.xlsx -w Data -r us-west-2 -i all -v gp2
- Using the 'all' parameter with the -i switch provides the option to manually assign instance types after initial assignment using any available instance type. This skips the assignment and reads the value in the 'Instance Final' column and updates pricing accordingly.
Assumptions & Considerations
- The unit pricing for both EC2 and EBS are converted into daily units.
- Pricing assumes OnDemand, AWS Provided Licensing, No application bundles, Tenancy is shared. These values can be changed in the script.
- If the OS can't be matched against Windows, Red Hat, or SUSE (Which have licensing built into the EC2 pricing) the instance will assume Linux as the OS.
- EC2 instances will match RAM in GB -2 where VM's having 16GB RAM may be assigned EC2 instance with 15GB RAM. This method was choosen to avoid over-sizing instances.
- The script does not factor in EBS snapshots which are currently $0.05 per/GB-month for data stored in all regions. It's a good idea to account for atleast 1 full snapshot for each volume.
- This script can easily be modified to work with RVTools output or other formats as required.