AWS EC2 Offering Description Web Service (awsec2offering)

Software vendors using Amazon Web Service's Elastic Compute Cloud are faced with understanding different EC2 offerings and their costs.

This RESTful web service returns both AWS EC2 on-demand and reserved instance offering descriptions which include both fixed and monthly costs. Marketplace and spot instance offerings are excluded. It obtains its information in the following manner ...

• Reserved instance offering information is obtained from AWS via DescribeReservedInstanceOfferings calls. While information is cached on the awsec2offering server, cached results are purged every 24 hours.
• On-demand instance offering information is not available via the AWS SDK. Therefore it has been hand transcribed from the AWS EC2 Pricing page into a JSON file on GitHub which the awsec2offering server accesses over the internet. This information is also purged every 24 hours. If you notice price changes, please contribute by ...
  • Posting it as an issue, or better yet,
  • Modifying aws-ec2-ondemand.json and send a pull request.

Request

The URI used to request EC2 instance offering descriptions takes this form ...

http://<host>/awsec2offering/api/<availabilityZone>/<productDescription>/<offeringType>/<instanceType>{,<instanceType>}

• <host> is the server. A permanent host has not yet been selected. It is temporarily hosted at p1software-eb1.elasticbeanstalk.com.
• <availabilityZone> if omitted, defaults to us-east-1.
• <productDescription> if omitted, defaults to linux. Recognized values are:
  • linux" (abbreviation of "Linux/UNIX")
  • linuxvpc (abbreviation of "Linux/UNIX VPC")
  • windows (abbreviation of "Windows")
  • windowsvpc (abbreviation of "Windows VPC")
• <offeringType> if omitted, is treated as a wildcard. Recognized values are:
  • light (abbreviation of "Light Utilization")
  • medium (abbreviation of "Medium Utilization")
  • heavy (abbreviation of "Heavy Utilization")
• <instanceType> if omitted, is treated as a wildcard. Multiple instance types may be specified using a comma separator. Consult the AWS pricing page for the recognized instance types.

This sample URL requests instance descriptions in us-east-1a for heavy utilization linux servers in both t1.micro and m1.small instance types.

        http://p1software-eb1.elasticbeanstalk.com/awsec2offering/api/us-east-1a/linux/heavy/t1.micro,m1.small

Response

The returned result is a JSON object whose ec2offerings value is an array of EC2 descriptions (pretty printed here) like this ...

{"ec2offerings":
[{"availabilityZone":"us-east-1a","offeringType":"On-Demand","instanceType":"t1.micro","productDescription":"Linux/UNIX","duration":0,"currencyCode":"USD","fixedPrice":0.0,"hourlyPrice":0.02}
,{"availabilityZone":"us-east-1a","offeringType":"Heavy Utilization","instanceType":"t1.micro","productDescription":"Linux/UNIX","duration":94608000,"currencyCode":"USD","fixedPrice":100.0,"hourlyPrice":0.0050}
,{"availabilityZone":"us-east-1a","offeringType":"Heavy Utilization","instanceType":"t1.micro","productDescription":"Linux/UNIX","duration":31536000,"currencyCode":"USD","fixedPrice":62.0,"hourlyPrice":0.0050}
,{"availabilityZone":"us-east-1a","offeringType":"On-Demand","instanceType":"m1.small","productDescription":"Linux/UNIX","duration":0,"currencyCode":"USD","fixedPrice":0.0,"hourlyPrice":0.06}
,{"availabilityZone":"us-east-1a","offeringType":"Heavy Utilization","instanceType":"m1.small","productDescription":"Linux/UNIX","duration":94608000,"currencyCode":"USD","fixedPrice":257.0,"hourlyPrice":0.012}
,{"availabilityZone":"us-east-1a","offeringType":"Heavy Utilization","instanceType":"m1.small","productDescription":"Linux/UNIX","duration":31536000,"currencyCode":"USD","fixedPrice":169.0,"hourlyPrice":0.014}
]}

Price Comparison Chart

Also see the companion AWS EC2 Price Comparison Chart is an example of what a client might do with the awsec2offering web service.

[] (https://github.com/kenklin/aws-price-comparison-chart)