[Cialug] Fwd: Announcing Micro Instances for Amazon EC2

Kenneth Younger kyounger at gmail.com
Thu Sep 9 09:47:53 CDT 2010


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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