Save up to 30% by Selecting Better Performing Amazon Instances

If you like the idea of exploiting market inconsistencies to lower your costs then you will love this paper and video from the Hot Cloud '12 conference: Exploiting Hardware Heterogeneity within the Same Instance Type of Amazon EC2.

The conclusion is interesting and is a source of good guidance:

• Amazon EC2 uses diversified hardware to host the same type of instance.  
• The hardware diversity results in performance variation.
• In general, the variation between the fast instances and slow  instances can reach 40%. In some applications, the variation can even approach up to 60%.  
• By selecting fast instances within the same instance type,  Amazon EC2 users can acquire up to 30% of cost saving, if the fast instances have a relatively low probability.

The abstract:

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How Vimeo Saves 50% on EC2 by Playing a Smarter Game

Nothing shows how much software architectures have changed than the intelligent scheduling of computation over differently priced compute resources. This isn't just a false economy either. Vimeo saves up to 50% on their video transcoding bill by intelligently playing the spot, reserved, and on-demand markets. If you are ready for some advanced reindeer games then take a look at  Vimeo EC2 transcoding where they explain their thinking. Even if you don't like their rules, it's the strategy that matters. This presentation was from 2011, so it would be interesting to see if the new reserved instance market has made a difference in their strategy. 

Here's Vimeo's approach for minimizing costs using spot, reserved, and on-demand instances:

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