14 DAY TRIAL // Amazon ushered in the era of the cloud. Amazon's Web Services made it affordable and easy to run any type of service in the cloud and have access to on-demand computing power.
The downside of this is that you're sharing hardware with others using AWS. If this is not an option for you, Amazon has an answer, it just introduced EC2 Dedicated Instances which give you exclusive access to a machine.
"Some of our customers have told us that they want more network isolation than is provided by 'classic EC2.' We met their needs with Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)," Amazon wrote.
"Some of those customers wanted to go even further. They have asked for hardware isolation so that they can be sure that no other company is running on the same physical host," it said.
"Today we are introducing a new EC2 concept — the Dedicated Instance. You can now launch Dedicated Instances within a Virtual Private Cloud on single-tenant hardware," it announced.
One of the big complaints about the so-called public cloud is that you're unsure who else is sharing the same physical machine as you.
Of course, everyone gets virtualized instances that really can't interact with each other, even though they share memory space and CPU time, but some companies and organizations may have restrictions that require them to use dedicated hardware.
Amazon already offers the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) option which enables users to operate in an isolated networking environment. If you're using a VPC, you now have the option to set the 'tenancy' to 'dedicated.'
This means that all the instances you create will have their own dedicated hardware, no other instance will run on that machine. You can also set individual instances to 'dedicated,' useful since, if you create a dedicated VPC, you can't convert it to a non-dedicated one later on.
As you can imagine, having one instance per machine is going to cost you. Amazon went with the simple route, you pay an extra $10 per hour if you have at least one dedicated instance. This figure doesn't go up no matter how many dedicated instances you have. Over the course of a year, this means that you'll pay a fixed fee of $87,600 for the privilege of running dedicated instances.