very different spot prices (almost factor 4!) in "Amazon EC2 Spot Instances Pricing" and "AWS Pricing Calculator"

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Hi, to understand my question please do the following:

  1. Display the web page "Amazon EC2 Spot Instances Pricing", select the region "US West (N. California)" and the Instance Family "GPU Instances - Current Generation" and sort for Linux/UNIX Usage so that you see the most cheapest instance at first. This is the instance inf1.xlarge that costs about 0,03$ per hour (today, i.e. on 04/12/2023).
  2. Display the "AWS Pricing Calculator" (sorry, here you must fill out the form from scratch because a saved complete configuration invoked by a share link doesn't show the hourly instance prices although these prices are very important information of such a configuration), choose the region US West (N. California), OS should already be set to Linux, select inf1 as Instance family, inf1.xlarge as Instance name and Spot instances as payment option. You see an hourly price of about 0,11$ per hour for the instance inf1.xlarge that is almost 4 times higher as the price of the web page "Amazon EC2 Spot Instances Pricing". Why??
  3. Perhaps because of this big difference (almost factor 4!) the starting chapter of the "AWS Pricing Calculator User Guide" (last paragraph "Pricing for AWS Pricing Calculator") contains the sentence "If the prices on the marketing pages are different from the prices on AWS Pricing Calculator, AWS uses the prices from the marketing pages when generating your estimates." Please read this sentence and think what it should mean. Who uses the prices from the marketing pages? AWS?? Does this mean: The AWS billing department uses the prices from the marketing pages when it generates its billings although the user saw completely different prices in the AWS pricing Calculator? But what purpose has the AWS Pricing Calculator when AWS applies this procedure? In the case that I describe here the prices differ almost by the factor 4! This means that the AWS Pricing Calculator shows completely wrong prices! If you disagree then please explain what of the two hourly prices of 0,03$ per hour and 0,11$ per hour is used in the billing and what is used in the AWS Pricing Calculator for the instance inf1.xlarge!

Kind regards, grook

grook
asked 5 months ago431 views
1 Answer
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Hi Grook,

Both the Amazon EC2 Spot Instances Pricing and AWS Pricing Calculator are showing estimates of the live Spot prices and are presenting them in a different ways and that maybe is the discrepancy you are seeing. The Amazon EC2 Spot Instances Pricing page shows "the lowest prices per instance type in the region"Spot Pricing Page. If you log into the console and look into the live Spot prices you can see that the lowest price for that instance is the same [minus some rounding] of the current price AWS Console - Spot Price history.

On the other hand, the AWS Pricing calculator is using the "historical average discount for inf1.xlarge" and it is listed as 89% of OD. The price that it is quoted in the AWS Pricing Calculator is the OD price [ 0.274/Hour] over which it later applies the discount when calculating the monthly TCO of your total compute. The AWS Pricing Calculator is presented this way so that you can mix and match different compute purchase options and can compare apples to apples. AWS Pricing Calculator

Hope this helps

AWS
Dabz
answered 5 months ago
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EXPERT
reviewed a month ago

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