Amazon EC2 Now Available In Micro

Last week Amazon Web Services (that’s the cloud computing division of Amazon) announced a reduction in pricing for the largest versions of their EC2 server offering.

Today Amazon has launched a new version of their EC2 server — the “micro instance”.

Amazon’s Jeff Barr explains how the Micro instances work, “Micro Instances (t1.micro) provide a small amount of consistent CPU resources and allow you to burst CPU capacity when additional cycles are available. They are available now in all Regions. You can buy Reserved Micro Instances and you can acquire Micro Instances on the Spot Market. Interestingly enough, they are available in both 32 and 64 bit flavors, both with 613 MB of RAM. The Micro Instances have no local, ephemeral storage, so you’ll need to Boot from EBS.”

It looks like the Micro instances could also be a good option for starting with EC2 as you can always move to one of the larger server offerings if the need arises.

Jeff also notes that the Micro instances could be used for non-traditional uses including:

1. DNS servers, load balancers, proxies, and similar services that handle a relatively low volume of requests.
2. Lightweight cron-driven tasks such as monitoring, health checks, or data updates.
3. Hands-on training and other classroom use.

Pricing for the Micro instances starts at $0.02 (two cents) per hour for Linux/Unix and $0.03 (three cents) per hour for Windows.