[Cialug] Fwd: Announcing Micro Instances for Amazon EC2

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Thu, Sep 9, 2010 at 9:11 AM, L. V. Lammert <lvl at omnitec.net> wrote:
> At 08:48 AM 9/9/2010, you wrote:
>>EC2 has been a very cheap way to experiment with servers in the past
>>at $0.075 per hour but that ran to $54/mo if you used it full time.
>>This new instance brings the price down to $14 /mo for a full time
>>instance which puts it into the same ballpark as a linode ($20/mo but
>>not an apples to apples comparison).
>
> Any feel of how the 'per hour' translates to actual usage? For
> example, does the cost structure actually product no charge when a
> web site is not getting page request? Does a system ever use *more*
> than the .02/hr?

The fee is per hour that the instance is running. So if it's idle you
get charged. There are no partial hours, so if you use it for 1 min or
42 min or 60 min it's one hour.

The only additional charges are for bandwidth and storage. Both are
ridiculously cheap. I have a few gigs of data on S3 and my cost is
pennies a month.

EC2 is not like a normal vps though. There is, by default at least, no
persistent storage. So if you boot it up, install nagios and then shut
it down, when you boot it up again you'll have to install nagios
again. You have to deliberately create persistent storage.

A common way is to customize your server installation and then create
a snapshot of this and in the future, instead of booting a default
image, boot your snapshot. This uses some of your storage space so if
you have a 2GB snapshot (that's quite big) you'll add $0.30 per month
to your cost. The benefit to this is huge, though. If you have a
website that scales horizontally (i.e. one server can handle 50 users,
two can handle 100 users, three 150 and etc) then you can use EC2 to
automatically spawn additional instances when your main server's load
reach 70% (or whatever) and then automatically shut them down when the
utilization drops. The rule system is quite sophisticated so you have
a lot of flexibility.

The cost to experiment with these is so piddly that for $5 you can
spend a weekend becoming an expert, or less than $1 to give it a quick
try.

Here are instructions: http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/public/deploy In
the time it takes to download a CD ISO you could have 10 servers up
and running.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
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"Lead, follow or get the hell out of the way." –Robert Nuzum (My dad)
summarizing an old military quote