The nearly man

I first heard of Amazon Web Services in 2006. It is now central to how we run our systems: "in the past six years, we’ve lowered pricing 18 times, and today we’re doing it again. We’re lowering pricing for the 19th time with a significant price decrease for Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon Elastic Map Reduce".

Today’s Amazon EC2 price reduction varies by instance type and by Region, with Reserved Instance prices dropping by as much as 37%, and On-Demand instance prices dropping up to 10%. In 2006, the cost of running a small website with Amazon EC2 on an m1.small instance was $876 per year. Today with a High Utilization Reserved Instance, you can run that same website for less than 1/3 of the cost at just $250 per year - an effective price of less than 3 cents per hour. As you can see below, we are lowering both On-Demand and Reserved Instances prices for our Standard, High-Memory and High-CPU instance families. The chart below highlights the price decreases for Linux instances in our US-EAST Region, but we are lowering prices in nearly every Region for both Linux and Windows instances.

I can't help but wonder what nearly means in "we are lowering prices in nearly every Region for both Linux and Windows instances" as we are in the EU region, but Heavy Utilization Reserved Instances appear to be the way forward. I wonder if Amazon will convert our baby to this automatically or if we will have to intervene.