Metal instance pricing question

Hi Jaroslaw,

Dedicated instances and bare-metal instances are two different offerings. A dedicated instance runs in a VPC on hardware that is dedicated to only one customer, however, that hardware can host multiple instances for that customer (multiple virtualized instances on the same underlying host). A dedicated instance is NOT what you are looking for if you want to run on a bare-metal instance as per your question.

You can read more about dedicated instances here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/dedicated-instance.html

Ec2 is billed per hour, with a minimum of 60 seconds of usage, metered to the nearest second. You do not pay for the instance when it has been stopped, you only pay for it when it is running. So in your example, if you are starting it and then stopping it after 8 hours each day for 3 weeks (21) days, then you will pay for 168 hours for the 3 weeks. Obviously since our billing is to the nearest second, if you stop slightly before the 8 hours or slight after - your billing will change accordingly.

With any instance, you need EBS storage. This is billed on a provisioned basis, of GB month, and pro-rated to actual usage. You will pay for any provisioned storage attached to an instance, regardless of whether the instance is running or not.

The shortest amount of time you would have to pay for an instance is 60 seconds, in the event you start it, and stop it after less than 60 seconds you will be billed for at least 60 seconds.

Obviously with large instances 60 seconds of usage isn't useful - as the operating system may not even fully boot up in that time.

In AWS Instances run from an Amazon Machine Image. You need to have an AMI for the Instance before you are able to launch it. You can either use an AMI that has been provided by AWS, we have common ones for many versions of Linux, Unix (FreeBSD) and Windows. If you want to use your own operating system, then you may import it into AWS, as a disk-snapshot, and then register the snapshot as an AMI which you can then launch your instance with. You obviously need to make sure that the operating system image that you import contains all the necessary hardware drivers for the instance type that you choose. In the case of bare-metal instances, you would need to ensure that you have at least the disk driver (AWS NVME driver) and the AWS ENA (network driver) installed onto the image that you import.

You can read about how to import a volume to AWS here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vm-import/latest/userguide/vmimport-import-snapshot.html

Shared instances, as the name implies, are virtual instances, in other words, more than one instance running on the same physical host. Bare metal is what the name implies, bare metal instances are not virtualized; they do not run under a hypervisor like non-Metal instances do, which is what you seem to be needing based on your question.

To get more technical and detailed information on EC2 I suggest that you read the following two documents:

1. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/concepts.html
2. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ec2/latest/instancetypes/instance-types.html