5th Generation Instances launched and Instance Price Increase

New instance types available 

We’re pleased to announce that as of the December 6th, 2018 Engine Yard will be supporting the latest generation of AWS instances, commonly known as 5th Generation Instances. These instances types are: 

• M5 - General purpose instances with up to 20% improvement in price/performance compared to M4 instances.
• M5d - M5 instances equipped with local NVMe-based SSD block level storage, for high speed temporary storage.
• M5a - Lower priced M5 instances, with AMD rather than Intel processors.
• C5 - Compute optimized instances with up to 25% improvement in price/performance compared to C4 instances.
• C5d - C5 instances equipped with local NVMe-based SSD block level storage, for high speed temporary storage.
• R5 - Memory optimized instances with up to 2x the FLOPS per core compared to R4 instances.
• R5d - R5 instances equipped with local NVMe-based SSD block level storage, for high speed temporary storage.
• R5a - Lower priced R5 instances, with AMD rather than Intel processors.
• I3 - Storage optimized instances for high transaction, low latency workloads.
• T3 - Burstable general purpose instances with up to 30% improvement in price/performance compared to T2 instances.

All 5th Generation instances will be available exclusively on our stable-v5 stack (stable-v5-3.0.51 onwards), so if your application(s) run on an older stack and you wish to use these instances please look to migrate them or contact Support for further guidance. Also, not all instance types are available in all AWS Regions, again please contact Support if you have any queries.

Instance pricing increases 

Effective January 1st, 2019, pricing of all AWS instances will be increased. New pricing will be reflected on your January invoice that you receive in February of 2019. 

The level of increase is dependent on the type of instance: 

• Older generation instances, which have been EOLed, will see a 5% increase in price, taking them to +15% of the AWS On-Demand price.
• Affected instances are C1, C3, M1, M2, M3, R3 and HI1.
• Newer instances, those of the 4th and 5th Generation, will see a 10% increase in price, due to the removal of the 10% discount currently applied, bringing them in-line with the AWS On-Demand price.
• Affected instances are C4, M4, R4 and T2, plus the newly released C5, M5, R5, I3 and T3.

The rationale behind these price increases is to encourage the adoption of newer AWS instance types and Engine Yard stack versions by existing customers, in order to provide them with the best possible experience, both in terms of features and price/performance, and is a part of our ongoing plan, which has seen the previous EOL of old instances and stacks as well as assisted migrations of customers to newer stacks and instances.

Aside from the performance improvements associated with the newer generation instances, customers migrating instance types can expect to see the following cost reductions for like-to-like instance migrations after the pricing increase: 

• Those migrating from 3rd generation instances to 4th generation instances can expect to see an instance cost reduction of around 35% for general purpose instances and 20% for compute optimized instances.
• Those migrating from 3rd to 5th generation instances the reduction would be around 40% for general purpose and 30% for compute optimized.
• Those migrating from 4th generation to 5th generation instances the reduction would be around 4% for general purpose and 15% for compute optimized. Comparing pre-increase 4th generation instances to post-increase 5th generation instances means a realised increase of 7% on general purpose instances and a reduction of 5% on compute optimized instances.

We appreciate your attention to this change as we look forward to serving you better as part of our continuous focus on 100% Customer Success.

If you have questions, please email Engine Yard Customer Success at customersuccess@engineyard.com