Instances

The Instances pricing tool shows current pricing for AWS EC2, RDS, and ElastiCache instances. The tool is completely open source and uses the same Amazon APIs available to everyone. Development for Instances is coordinated through Slack as well as on Github.

Instances has a small number of tools for comparing cloud instance pricing and making the best choice for your workload.

Columns and Filters

Nearly every service attribute available for a specific instance is available, although most are hidden by default. You can add more attributes, for example GPUs, in by clicking the Columns dropdown. Other dropdowns allow for selecting the Region, changing the per-unit basis of calculation (e.g. for vCPUs), and changing the term of the Reserved instance purchase.

For each column that is shown, it can be further filtered using simple glob matching, and the entire table can be searched using the top right search box.

Regex Support

Each column and the top right search bar support regex expressions. So you can enter an expression like this: [rt][3456].?.larg and the resulting rows will be a mix of t and r instances as shown above.

Comparing Instances

By clicking on an individual row in the table, you can select it to be compared with other rows. You can do this while filtering as well. Click Compare Selected and only the selected rows will be shown. The URL is also changed so this specific comparison can be shared with others.

Detail Pages

For EC2 and RDS, the "API Name" column contains clickable links to each instance type. The Detail Page for the instance is essentially a pivot of the main table, with some additional tools to make the information more digestible.

Pricing Widget

In the upper left, a pricing widget has selectors for calculating the estimated cost of the instance in different regions, over different amounts of time, or for different software that runs on the instance. When the price is shown as "N/A" that indicates that the instance is not available to purchase with the combination of selectors.

Instance Attributes

In the middle of each Detail Page are the major categories of attributes and their values. These attributes are all selectable as columns in the main Instances pages. To request more attributes, click "Open a ticket" in the bottom right.

Saving and Clearing Filters

Instances automatically saves the filters and selections that are applied to local storage. This means that when you open a new session you will be greeted with the most recent set of filters and columns. This can be helpful for working on services which mostly use the same types of instances.

To reset the table, click Clear Filters.

Export Data

The table, with its filters applied, sorted, and with columns shown and hidden, can be exported exactly as a CSV. Data for EC2 is also available for free from the Vantage API.

Contribute

Contribute to this page on GitHub or join the #cloud-costs-handbook channel in the Vantage Community Slack.