Today I Learned Cloud

What is the most expensive ec2 instance?

Amazon Web Services offers an incredibly diverse amount of elastic compute cloud (EC2) instances in their cloud offering. The instances are designed to handle many different workloads, such as memory optimized, compute optimized, generic instances, and many others. Each of these have various pricing levels for what is provided.

What is the most expensive ec2 instance? The most expensive Amazon EC2 is currently the p3dn.24xlarge which costs $31.212 USD per hour when running a Linux OS and $35.628 per hour when running the Window OS on the instance in the US East (N. Virginia) region. The instance comes with 96 vCPUs, 768 GiB of RAM and two 900 GB NVMe SSDs.

This node is classified by Amazon as a GPU instance in the current generation, and therefore has multiple graphical processing units directly attached to the instance. In the case of the p3dn.24xlarge, there are eight NVidia Tesla V100 GPUs.

The p3dn.24xlarge Instance

This machine is designed for massive amounts of processing. It would mostly be used for crunching machine learning models, processing high performance computing (HPC) models, running computational fluid dynamics or financial models. Other great use cases that would be ideal for this type of EC2 instance is autonomous vehicle models and drug discovery models.

Each GPU attached to the instance has 5120 CUDA Cores as well as 640 Tensor cores for a total of 40960 CUDA cores and 5120 tensor cores. The GPUs in the system are connected via NVidia NVLink. This would be an incredibly powerful machine to use with any deep learning model or for any of the previously mentioned use cases. There are also 96 vCPU cores running at 2.5 GHz provided by the Intel Xeon P-8175M processors running in the instance. The instance also boasts 768 GiB or system memory, or RAM, as well as 256 GiB or GPU memory.

The p3dn.24xlarge also includes two dedicated 900 GB NVMe SSD hard drives attached to the instance as well as dedicated elastic block store bandwidth up to 19 Gbps. The networking configuration available to the instance is up to 100 Gbps, which is great for any distributed setup that might be configured with these, or other instances.

All of the above can be used on demand for $31.212 USD per hour if running the Linux operating system in the US East (N. Virginia) region. This works out to about $749.09 USD a day, about $22784.76 USD a month, and $273417.12 USD per year. This may seem steep for most, but the raw processing capability of this instance may make it worth the price for others.

However, if this is an instance type that a customer is willing to use but finds the price too expensive, there are several ways to use the instance for a cheaper price. This includes something known as spot pricing, as well as another offering by Amazon known as reserved pricing.

Running The p3dn.24xlarge For Less

With spot pricing for the p3dn.24xlarge, if running the Linux operating system, the price of the instance is dropped to $9.3636 USD per hour in the US East (N. Virginia) region. On the other hand if you are running the Windows operating system, the price is dropped to $13.7796 per hour. This is a reduction in price of 70% for the Linux case and 61.3% in the Windows case! The main disadvantage of using the spot pricing model is that the instance can be taken away from you at any time. This means that you could lose some of the computation that was done by the instance if it hadn’t been saved before the instance was taken away.

As mentioned, the other way to save money on running this instance is with the reserved pricing model offered by Amazon. This allows the customer to pre-pay for the instance in either a one year term or a three year term and receive a reduction in the effective per hour pricing of that instance.

For the standard one year term with no upfront payment but a one year commitment with monthly payments of $14026.95 the price is reduced to an effective $19.215 USD per hour, a 38% price savings. If a partial upfront payment is made for $80152 and a monthly payment of $6679.50 is made for the year the effective per hour pricing becomes $18.30 USD, a 41% savings. If the entire amount of $157098 is paid up front for the year, the effective per hour price becomes $17.934 USD per hour, which works out to a 43% savings.

For the standard three year term with no upfront payment but a three year commitment with monthly payments of $7603.68, the effective per hour pricing for this instance is $10.416 USD. This works out to a 67% savings from the on demand pricing. If the partial upfront method is used and an amount of $126779 is paid and then a monthly amount of $3520.06 is paid, this works out to about $9.644 USD per hour for the instance, a 69% savings over the on demand price. Finally if the entire amount of the three year term is paid upfront, or $238250, with no monthly payment required for the three year term, the effective hourly rate of the instance works out to $9.066 for a savings of 71% over the on demand pricing.

As you can see, if this is a system you may need to use full time for the next few years, you can get an incredible savings for the compute and processing power available. Definitely a good way to access this type of instance if it is needed long term. Otherwise, paying the spot price is a really good alternative if you can risk having some work lost when the instance is taken away if on demand usage of the instance spikes.

Dedicated Hosting

Another way that this instance can be used with Amazon Web Services is to use something they call Dedicated Hosting. By setting up the instance in this way, the host is dedicated to your customer account on AWS. This can help meet compliance requirements by requiring that nothing about the instance is shared with other AWS customers. The instance becomes dedicated to your account.

The Dedicated Hosting can be done in several pricing models. It can be paid in an on demand way with hourly pricing, or it can be purchased with a reservation allowing for up to 70% savings from the on demand pricing. For the hourly pricing the p3dn.24xlarge works out to $34.333 USD per hour in the US East (N. Virginia) region. This is only slightly more than the non dedicated on demand pricing.

For the standard one year term for the dedicated hosting with no upfront payment but a one year commitment with monthly payments of $15429.28 the price is reduced to an effective $21.136 USD per hour, a 38% price savings. If a partial upfront payment is made for $88167 and a monthly payment of $7347.45 is made for the year the effective per hour pricing becomes $20.13 USD, a 41% savings. If the entire amount of $172808 is paid up front for the year, the effective per hour price becomes $19.727 USD per hour, which works out to a 43% savings.

For the standard three year term for the dedicated hosting with no upfront payment but a three year commitment with monthly payments of $8364.34, the effective per hour pricing for this instance is $11.458 USD. This works out to a 67% savings from the on demand pricing. If the partial upfront method is used and an amount of $139402 is paid and then a monthly amount of $3871.92 is paid, this works out to about $10.608 USD per hour for the instance, a 69% savings over the on demand price. Finally if the entire amount of the three year term is paid upfront, or $262075, with no monthly payment required for the three year term, the effective hourly rate of the instance works out to $9.972 for a savings of 71% over the on demand pricing for the dedicated hosting.

As you can see, there are many different ways of paying for this most expensive EC2 instance, with some being much cheaper than others.