Introducing CUPS

CUP – Cost of Unit Process, CUP is the cost in USD to get 1 CMIP for a given instance.

CUP is get by diving cost of the instance per-hour-running by the number of CMIPS that the instance achieved in the tests.

So we get the next table, sorted from cheapest to expensive:

Instance name CMIPS Price/CMIP
Linode 1x priority (smallest) 1427 0.0000194658568870202
Linode 2x priority 2556 0.000021735350373848
OVH Server EG 24G 3881 0.000035429
Digital Ocean 48GB RAM – 16 Cores – 480 GB SSD 6172 0.0001142255
Digital Ocean 64GB RAM – 20 Cores – 640 GB SSD 8116 0.0001159438
Amazon CC2 Cluster Compute 16608 0.0001445087
Digital Ocean 96GB RAM – 24 Cores – 960 GB SSD 9733 0.0001449707
Amazon C1 High CPU Extra Large 3101 0.0001870364
Amazon Memory Optimized CR1 Cluster 8xlarge 16468 0.0002125334
Amazon Second Generation M3 Extra Large 2065 0,0002421308
Amazon M1 Extra Large 1635 0.000293578
Amazon M1 Large 817 0.0002937576
Amazon M1 Small 203 0.0002955665
Amazon M2 High Memory Quadruple Extra Large 4281 0.0003830881
Amazon T1 Micro 49 0.0004081633
RackSpace First Generation 30 GB RAM – 8 Cores – 1200 GB 4539 0.0004362194
Amazon High I/O Quadruple Extra Large 6263 0.0004949705

And the graphic, sorted from expensive to cheap.

Orange bars reflect CUP (multiplied by 10M to fit well in the graph), and blue bars show MIPS achieved by the instance.

cmips-cups-2013-09-21-cost-unit-power

Desktop: Intel i7-4770S and Laptop: Intel SU4100 have no CUP associated as are included in the graph only to compare CPU performance.

So, having also all the other parameters in mind (bandwidth per instance, cost per exceeded Gigabyte, storage, speed of the storage, time to launch a new instance, if provisioning is paid by hour, by day or by month, etc…) most Startups that use webservers and the Cloud to scale up Arrays of instances to deal with peaks at highly traffic hours, and scale down the number of instances at valley hours or when number or users/traffic decreases, will consider using the instances with lower CUP, or find a balance between instance with enough performance and low Cost of Unit Process.

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  1. Pingback: The Cloud is for Scaling | Carles Mateo

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