{"slug": "amazon-ec2", "name": "Amazon EC2", "category": "infra", "category_name": "Infrastructure and DevOps", "description": "", "recommenders": 3, "commenters": 20, "warners": 7, "score": -1.15, "rising": -0.98, "first": "2025-11-17", "latest": "2026-09-17", "why": "we switched from fargate to EC2 auto scaling group so we could run a custom AMI", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 7, "compare": 3, "warn": 7}, "spark": [2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "we switched from fargate to EC2 auto scaling group so we could run a custom AMI", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": "aws.eu", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Amazon EC2", "AWS EC2"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 775187971, "item_id": 48449248, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48449248", "by": "paulddraper", "date": "2026-06-08", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Use EC2, EBS, S3, Route53 plus EKS, RDS, ElastiCache.", "excerpt": "You should really stay away from any \"high level\" AWS product, as there is almost always something much better and more flexible. Use EC2, EBS, S3, Route53 plus EKS, RDS, ElastiCache. But anything else that isn't low-to-mid-level (looking at you Beanstalk), use something better. Clerk, WorkOS, etc.", "context": "", "use_case": "low-level AWS building blocks", "switched_from": "", "story": "Amazon Cognito now supports multi-Region replication"}, {"id": 737369668, "item_id": 46085604, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46085604", "by": "pmontra", "date": "2025-11-28", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We had no problems with EC2 VMs.", "excerpt": "A customer of mine has two projects. One running on their own hardware, Django + Celery. The other one running on AWS EC2, Django alone. In the first one we use Celery to run some jobs that may last from a few seconds to some minutes. In the other one we create a new VM and make it run the job and we make it self destroy on job termination. The communication is over a shared database and SQS queues. We have periodic ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "A first look at Django's new background tasks"}, {"id": 735290705, "item_id": 45955669, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45955669", "by": "leetrout", "date": "2025-11-17", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "we switched from fargate to EC2 auto scaling group so we could run a custom AMI", "excerpt": "Just as an aside for the fargate convo... we switched from fargate to EC2 auto scaling group so we could run a custom AMI that has our container images (which are larger than I like) pre-baked and we went from a ~3 minute startup in fargate to ~30 seconds with the ASG when it's not triggering a scaling action. We're using prefect not Temporal and each prefect flow launches in a discrete ECS task so the waiting added ", "context": "", "use_case": "Container hosts with custom AMI", "switched_from": "AWS Fargate", "story": "Deploying Temporal on AWS ECS with Terraform"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 783182048, "item_id": 48948878, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48948878", "by": "ButlerianJihad", "date": "2026-07-17", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "It was impossible, actually impossible, to limit or cap my cloud expenses in any billing cycle.", "excerpt": "For a while I had a portion of my \"homelab\" on AWS. I was an educator in a classroom where the students were learning cloud stuff, and the instructor was encouraging the students to stand-up cloud environments for learning, so I figured that I would do the same. I used AWS' free tier, of course, and I enjoyed the initial setup in EC2, and I did a LAMP-stack MediaWiki installation. It wasn't too difficult, but two thi", "context": "educator with homelab", "use_case": "homelab hosting", "switched_from": "", "story": "AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data - $1.7 BILLION"}, {"id": 782456657, "item_id": 48903541, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48903541", "by": "hsin003", "date": "2026-07-14", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "ec2 is heavy in terms of cost", "excerpt": "does eBPF be serving for security enough? ec2 is heavy in terms of cost while containarium (https://github.com/FootprintAI/Containarium) can achieve both, safe & cheap.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Clawk \u2013 Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop"}, {"id": 769347057, "item_id": 48084191, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084191", "by": "te_chris", "date": "2026-05-10", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "And this right here is why I use GCP.", "excerpt": "\u201cEC2 or Lightsail\u201d. And this right here is why I use GCP. Google got VMs right.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left"}, {"id": 749867728, "item_id": 46866733, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46866733", "by": "mirashii", "date": "2026-02-02", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "AWS had an outage that blocked all EC2 operations just a few months ago", "excerpt": "AWS had an outage that blocked all EC2 operations just a few months ago: https://aws.amazon.com/message/101925/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "GitHub experience various partial-outages/degradations"}]}], "who": [{"by": "mattm", "context": "runs personal services on one instance", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49134380", "date": "2026-08-01"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["cloud compute", "hosting personal services", "homelab hosting", "work cloud vms", "cloud compute instances", "low-level aws building blocks"], "compared": [{"slug": "aws-fargate", "name": "AWS Fargate", "co": 1, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "terraform", "name": "Terraform", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746163", "title": "Bend \u2013 a language that blocks AI mistakes via proof and runs on GPUs", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49096605", "title": "Software for One", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945241", "title": "AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data - $1.7 BILLION", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48892859", "title": "Show HN: Clawk \u2013 Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48766026", "title": "The Short Leash AI Coding Method for Beating Fable", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48657030", "title": "We're making Bunny DNS free: because a faster internet won't build itself", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"recommend": 2}, "2025-12": {"warn": 1, "compare": 1}, "2026-01": {"neutral": 2, "warn": 2}, "2026-02": {"warn": 1, "compare": 1}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {"neutral": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-06": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 1, "compare": 1}, "2026-07": {"neutral": 1, "warn": 2}, "2026-08": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-09": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-10": {}}, "versions": [], "version_unnamed": 0, "family_ref": null, "runs_on": null, "lines": [], "quotes": [{"id": 795945040, "item_id": 49746565, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746565", "by": "gr_norm", "date": "2026-09-17", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Is EC2 real-world enough?", "excerpt": "Is EC2 real-world enough? From June: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/aws-nitro-isolation-engine-formally-verifying-the-hypervisor-in-the-aws-nitro-system/ And for the PQ parts of Apple's crypto libraries, from May: https://security.apple.com/blog/formal-verification-corecrypto/ Similar from Microsoft, from July: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/verifying-rust-cryptography-in-symcrypt-from-standards-", "context": "", "use_case": "cloud compute", "switched_from": "", "story": "Bend \u2013 a language that blocks AI mistakes via proof and runs on GPUs"}, {"id": 786150081, "item_id": 49134380, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49134380", "by": "mattm", "date": "2026-08-01", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "All my personal services are running on one EC2 instance", "excerpt": "Yeah this is what I did. All my personal services are running on one EC2 instance and I use subdomains to separate them. If I need more memory it's easy to scale up. I just use sqlite on the instance for my database. You don't need a postgres service if it's just for you. Hosted services are only great for setup and scaling. You're not going to need scaling. Infra setup can now be done easily with AI and terraform.", "context": "runs personal services on one instance", "use_case": "hosting personal services", "switched_from": "", "story": "Software for One"}, {"id": 783182048, "item_id": 48948878, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48948878", "by": "ButlerianJihad", "date": "2026-07-17", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "It was impossible, actually impossible, to limit or cap my cloud expenses in any billing cycle.", "excerpt": "For a while I had a portion of my \"homelab\" on AWS. I was an educator in a classroom where the students were learning cloud stuff, and the instructor was encouraging the students to stand-up cloud environments for learning, so I figured that I would do the same. I used AWS' free tier, of course, and I enjoyed the initial setup in EC2, and I did a LAMP-stack MediaWiki installation. It wasn't too difficult, but two thi", "context": "educator with homelab", "use_case": "homelab hosting", "switched_from": "", "story": "AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data - $1.7 BILLION"}, {"id": 782456657, "item_id": 48903541, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48903541", "by": "hsin003", "date": "2026-07-14", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "ec2 is heavy in terms of cost", "excerpt": "does eBPF be serving for security enough? ec2 is heavy in terms of cost while containarium (https://github.com/FootprintAI/Containarium) can achieve both, safe & cheap.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Clawk \u2013 Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop"}, {"id": 780307440, "item_id": 48769215, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48769215", "by": "fny", "date": "2026-07-02", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "For work, EC2.", "excerpt": "For work, EC2. For play, the cheapest VM I could find: https://vpshostingservice.co/ They have specials every now and then.", "context": "", "use_case": "work cloud VMs", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Short Leash AI Coding Method for Beating Fable"}, {"id": 778573409, "item_id": 48660838, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48660838", "by": "sparkling", "date": "2026-06-24", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "Hetzner VPS prices are still a fraction of comparable AWS EC2 instances", "excerpt": "The Hetzner price increase was brutal, but the reality is: Hetzner VPS prices are still a fraction of comparable AWS EC2 instances. >many European companies aren't as competitive as their US counterpart. I don't think any serious Enterprise account would go with Hetzner today, the service range and depth is simply not comparable to the 3 big clouds. Saving $20 on a VPS is not going to be a deciding factor for Enterpr", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "We're making Bunny DNS free: because a faster internet won't build itself"}, {"id": 775407840, "item_id": 48462990, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48462990", "by": "sunbirdLabs", "date": "2026-06-09", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I focused on maxing out the standard infrastructure tiers", "excerpt": "Yeah! In the Accelerated Computing tier. I focused on maxing out the standard infrastructure tiers: General Purpose, Compute, Memory, and Storage optimised tiers. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/", "context": "", "use_case": "Cloud compute instances", "switched_from": "", "story": "What an $83,000/month AWS EC2 server does"}, {"id": 775187971, "item_id": 48449248, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48449248", "by": "paulddraper", "date": "2026-06-08", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Use EC2, EBS, S3, Route53 plus EKS, RDS, ElastiCache.", "excerpt": "You should really stay away from any \"high level\" AWS product, as there is almost always something much better and more flexible. Use EC2, EBS, S3, Route53 plus EKS, RDS, ElastiCache. But anything else that isn't low-to-mid-level (looking at you Beanstalk), use something better. Clerk, WorkOS, etc.", "context": "", "use_case": "low-level AWS building blocks", "switched_from": "", "story": "Amazon Cognito now supports multi-Region replication"}, {"id": 769347057, "item_id": 48084191, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084191", "by": "te_chris", "date": "2026-05-10", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "And this right here is why I use GCP.", "excerpt": "\u201cEC2 or Lightsail\u201d. And this right here is why I use GCP. Google got VMs right.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left"}, {"id": 767616194, "item_id": 47976012, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47976012", "by": "autotune", "date": "2026-05-01", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Technologies: AWS, EKS, GitHub Actions, crossplane, Terraform, Azure DevOps, EC2", "excerpt": "Location: Charleston, South Carolina. Open to relocation if supported as part of sign-on bonus. Remote: Preferred. Technologies: AWS, EKS, GitHub Actions, crossplane, Terraform, Azure DevOps, EC2. Resume/CV: linkedin.com/in/lsdir Email: elliotechne42@gmail.com GitHub: https://github.com/autotune", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2026)"}, {"id": 750385777, "item_id": 46899111, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46899111", "by": "wiether", "date": "2026-02-05", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "OVH VPS is not the same as say, AWS EC2", "excerpt": "OVH VPS is not the same as say, AWS EC2. It's their \"Compute\" under \"Public Cloud\" that is competing against AWS EC2. https://us.ovhcloud.com/public-cloud/compute/ They handled the fire terribly and after that they improved a bit, but an OVH VPS is just a VM running on a single piece of hardware. Quite not the same thing as the \"Compute\" which is running on clusters.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Don't rent the cloud, own instead"}, {"id": 749867728, "item_id": 46866733, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46866733", "by": "mirashii", "date": "2026-02-02", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "AWS had an outage that blocked all EC2 operations just a few months ago", "excerpt": "AWS had an outage that blocked all EC2 operations just a few months ago: https://aws.amazon.com/message/101925/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "GitHub experience various partial-outages/degradations"}, {"id": 746263088, "item_id": 46641443, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46641443", "by": "Kwpolska", "date": "2026-01-15", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "basically a 16% markup by today's exchange rate", "excerpt": "EC2 pricing: https://aws.eu/ec2/pricing/on-demand/ The prices for the only region in Germany are very similar to the prices in eu-west-1 (Frankfurt), except in \u20ac instead of $, so that\u2019s basically a 16% markup by today's exchange rate. Also, AMD CPUs appear to be completely missing.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "AWS European Sovereign Cloud"}, {"id": 746251952, "item_id": 46640747, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640747", "by": "electroly", "date": "2026-01-15", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "EC2 instances can hibernate, too.", "excerpt": "EC2 instances can hibernate, too. You stop paying for the instance while it's hibernated; you pay the EBS storage cost only. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/Hibernate.html", "context": "", "use_case": "cloud VM hibernation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Linux boxes via SSH: suspended when disconected"}, {"id": 745306176, "item_id": 46581636, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46581636", "by": "cryptica", "date": "2026-01-11", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "So AWS EC2 represented a 56x cost factor.", "excerpt": "I started self-hosting after noticing that my AWS bill increased from like $300 per month to $600 per month within a couple of years. When looking at my bill, 3/4 of the cost was 'AWS Other'; mostly bandwidth. I couldn't understand why I was paying so much for bandwidth given that all my database instances ran on the same host as the app servers and I didn't have any regular communication between instances. I suspect", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "2026 is the Year of Self-hosting"}, {"id": 744356708, "item_id": 46522294, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46522294", "by": "ec109685", "date": "2026-01-06", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use Prompt, Ever Terminal, Whisper, EC2 and Claude Code.", "excerpt": "I use Prompt, Ever Terminal, Whisper, EC2 and Claude Code. I can build anything with it. Having Claude on top of a terraform repo lets me fully control my infra. Claude is so good at AWS and terraform, and it even found a $3k monthly accidental spend I had running (also sent a refund request to hopefully get some credit back). Also have a Claude driven CI workflow in GitHub to help keep everything on track. Having fu", "context": "", "use_case": "hosting dev environment", "switched_from": "", "story": "Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone"}, {"id": 738246161, "item_id": 46140385, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46140385", "by": "michaelt", "date": "2025-12-03", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "EC2 was twice the price for an on-demand instance", "excerpt": "On \"runpod community cloud\" renting a 5090 costs $0.69/hour [1] and it consumes about $0.10/hour electricity, if running at full power and paying $0.20/kWh. On Amazon, buying a 5090 costs $3000 [2] That's a payback time of 212 days. And Runpod is one of the cheaper cloud providers; for the GPUs I compared, EC2 was twice the price for an on-demand instance. Rental prices for GPUs are pretty darn high. [1] https://www.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Are we repeating the telecoms crash with AI datacenters?"}, {"id": 737997440, "item_id": 46124840, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124840", "by": "embedding-shape", "date": "2025-12-02", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Not sure using EC2/AWS/Amazon is a good example here", "excerpt": "> The only caveat being this assumes all your data can fit on a single machine Does my data fit in RAM? https://yourdatafitsinram.net/ Not sure using EC2/AWS/Amazon is a good example here, if you're squeezing for large single-node performance you most certainly go for dedicated servers, or at least avoid vCPUs like a plague.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "100k TPS over a billion rows: the unreasonable effectiveness of SQLite"}, {"id": 737369668, "item_id": 46085604, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46085604", "by": "pmontra", "date": "2025-11-28", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We had no problems with EC2 VMs.", "excerpt": "A customer of mine has two projects. One running on their own hardware, Django + Celery. The other one running on AWS EC2, Django alone. In the first one we use Celery to run some jobs that may last from a few seconds to some minutes. In the other one we create a new VM and make it run the job and we make it self destroy on job termination. The communication is over a shared database and SQS queues. We have periodic ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "A first look at Django's new background tasks"}, {"id": 735290705, "item_id": 45955669, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45955669", "by": "leetrout", "date": "2025-11-17", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "we switched from fargate to EC2 auto scaling group so we could run a custom AMI", "excerpt": "Just as an aside for the fargate convo... we switched from fargate to EC2 auto scaling group so we could run a custom AMI that has our container images (which are larger than I like) pre-baked and we went from a ~3 minute startup in fargate to ~30 seconds with the ASG when it's not triggering a scaling action. We're using prefect not Temporal and each prefect flow launches in a discrete ECS task so the waiting added ", "context": "", "use_case": "Container hosts with custom AMI", "switched_from": "AWS Fargate", "story": "Deploying Temporal on AWS ECS with Terraform"}]}