Bid for Amazon EC2 services

BORROWING AN IDEA from a number of other firms, the online bookseller Amazon is offering users cut-price access to its EC2 web services platform.

Today the company announced its Spot Instances feature, which is a new pricing option designed to encourage users to buy and consume its idle computing resources.

Prices will change depending on supply and demand, Amazon said, but firms that bid the highest for its services will get access to the platform and be able to use it as and when they need to.

Amazon suggested that Spot Instances would be most suitable for customers that have flexible start and stop times for their rendering, data processing, modelling and analysis processing, adding that by working in this way they would be able to benefit from lower prices, and more importantly, only those prices that they are prepared to pay.

"As customers continued to expand their use of Amazon web services, they started asking if additional pools of capacity were available, even if only for a few hours at a time. Some customers were looking to reduce costs in exchange for being flexible as to when they run their application; others told us they were willing to pay more when they had urgent, high volume needs," said Peter De Santis, general manger of Amazon EC2. "Because of the dynamic nature of supply and demand in the Amazon EC2 environment, we developed Spot Instances to let customers take advantage of our unused capacity while specifying a price they are willing to pay."

However, users beware, should your bid fall below any current bid price you could find your service cancelled. Until, that is, you up your bid. While you are running an EC2 service, pricing is charged by the hour, and Amazon said that, should a firm cancel its use, no partial hours will be charged.

Another firm currently testing a pay what you want option is IT reseller Binarynow, which on Wednesday will complete its recent experiment.

Binarynow has been charging as little as $1 per application over a two week period, and we published some early sales figures last week. According to Binarynow it is going well. We expect to have a full report on how well, after Wednesday. µ