[Cialug] Fwd: Announcing Micro Instances for Amazon EC2

[Kenneth Younger]

Wow. I'm at Rackspace right now, because their prices were better, but this
might just have me switch back.

One of the other benefits that EC2 offers is the high-memory or high-CPU
instances. Rackspace just gives you a proportionate amount more RAM, Disk,
and CPU in their next-larger instance size. One of the instances I plan on
running will be a Memcache server, which I was just going to have co-exists
with the file server, but this lets me separate those out. Me likey.

On Thu, Sep 9, 2010 at 9:40 AM, Matthew Nuzum <newz at bearfruit.org> wrote:

> 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
> newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin, identi.ca and twitter
>
> "Lead, follow or get the hell out of the way." –Robert Nuzum (My dad)
> summarizing an old military quote
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