New Flavours!

We’re very excited to announce our new instance flavours. We know as well as anyone that a general purpose compute node is great, but once you start getting into larger instance sizes you have a better idea of the performance characteristics and demands of your server. After hitting the drawing board and crunching some numbers, we’ve put together two new flavour types: High Memory, and High Compute. These flavours are available on instance sizes greater than 4GB and you can start using them today from the instance launch screen.

Cost and Value Modelling

We spent a lot of time putting these new flavours together, to offer the best value for everyone no matter your needs. We will be updating our pricing page shortly to include the new flavour types. Once of the biggest challenges to introducing these new options was ensuring that we can present it in an un-intimidating and easy to understand manner. In the spirit of transparency and making sure you get the best value for your computing needs we took the time to model out the value proposition for three different types of demand: General Purpose Computing, High Memory, and High Compute. Graphing the relationship between the cost, and perceived value for each type of customer shows how these new flavour types are extremely valuable.

General Purpose

The General Purpose (GP) flavour type is for a user who requires a balanced, and powerful server. A user who values CPU, Memory, and Disk space equally. The High Memory and High Compute flavour types are less attractive in the general purpose case because they don’t provide equal increases across the board. You can see that the GP flavours really stand out.

High Memory

The High Memory (HM) flavour type is for a user who has more demand for memory than disk or CPU. Compared to the General Purpose version of the same flavour, HM instances have 60GB of disk space, and double the amount of memory. For memory heavy applications, the GP flavour type doesn’t make as much sense for you because you’re provisioned more CPU and Disk than you require and your values are not the same as a General Purpose user. Let’s view the same graph as a user who values memory over all else, and you can quickly see how the High Memory flavour is attractive for this user.

High Compute

The High Compute (HC) flavour type is meant for users with heavy CPU requirements over memory and disk. Compared to the General Purpose version of the same flavour, HC instances have 60GB of disk space and twice the amount of CPU cores available. Let’s now view the same graph weighted for a user who values CPU over all else. Again, you can see how the High Compute flavour is very attractive over the General Purpose of the next size up.

Summary

These new flavour types will allow unparalleled cost savings and customization. Allowing you to build exactly the cloud that you need, without wasting money on resources you don’t need, all metered by the minute and running on our blazing fast hardware. If you already are using a General Purpose flavour and you would like to switch to a High Memory or High Compute flavour: simply save a snapshot of your current instance, and create a new instance using the new flavour restoring from that snapshot (assuming that it fits on disk).

We would love to hear your feedback on how you’re making use of the new flavour types to build your infrastructure, and you can get started immediately in your Dashboard. You will see the new flavours split up by type, with the full detailed breakdown in the sidebar.