Moore’s law is a wonderful thing.
Users of cloud computing frequently talk about its advantages; those include lower capital expenditures, programmable infrastructure, and the power of agile deployment. One thing that doesn’t get as much attention though, is how the advantages of Moore’s law are significantly magnified by using the cloud. After all, while buying infrastructure might lock you into using the same equipment for the next few years, using a cloud service means that customers get standardized instance sizes, and the infrastructure provider can refresh the underlying hardware a lot faster.
Here at Engine Yard, we’ve been aggressively passing these savings along to our customers. A few weeks ago we dropped instance prices by aggregating a pool of EC2 reserved instances, and taking advantage of Amazon’s just-released consolidated billing feature to get reduced costs for these instances. Last week, we passed through a savings in outbound bandwidth pricing—upto a 20% decrease across all tiers of usage.
Today we’re announcing that we’ll be dropping the monthly minimum for using Engine Yard Cloud. This is a direct response to feedback from users working on projects that haven’t yet deployed to production. We now know that many of you are using Engine Yard Cloud for development and staging environments pre-launch, where costs don’t quite make it to $25. We agree—things should be different, and so starting today that minimum goes away, and we move to being a completely pay-as-you-go platform.
Run your instances only when you need them, and pay only for what you use, regardless of whether you’re a small group of developers building the next big Rails application, or a production environment serving millions of users.
So there you have it: three price decreases in just the last month. Stay tuned for more—there are exciting new features in the pipeline, and we can’t wait to tell you about them!
