Amazon adds free tier to AWS - Calgarypuck Forums - The Unofficial Calgary Flames Fan Community

photon · 10-21-2010, 01:05 PM

http://aws.amazon.com/free/

Nice to have a free tier to sign up and be able to test things out, play around, get familiar etc..

EDIT: If you have to ask what this is, you don't need it

cKy · 10-21-2010, 02:00 PM

I hate the cloud idea. The whole premise of it just bugs me. Stupid new buzz word of the year.

Rathji · 10-21-2010, 03:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by photon

http://aws.amazon.com/free/

Nice to have a free tier to sign up and be able to test things out, play around, get familiar etc..

EDIT: If you have to ask what this is, you don't need it

That is actually really useful.

photon · 10-21-2010, 03:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cKy

I hate the cloud idea. The whole premise of it just bugs me. Stupid new buzz word of the year.

Been around for much longer than a year. Cloud computing is great for lots of different situations.

Shazam · 10-21-2010, 03:54 PM

Motherfata. Need to cancel my regular account and go with this for dev purposes.

Shazam · 10-21-2010, 03:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cKy

I hate the cloud idea. The whole premise of it just bugs me. Stupid new buzz word of the year.

You can create a VM in the cloud and install whatever the hell you want.

That makes it colossally useful.

sclitheroe · 10-21-2010, 06:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cKy

I hate the cloud idea. The whole premise of it just bugs me. Stupid new buzz word of the year.

That’s unfortunate. Meanwhile, I’ll take all the business opportunities you are leaving on the table.

Barnes · 10-22-2010, 07:32 AM

This whole Internet thing is just a fad.

Nice find. We use AWS for our site and Facebook app and have been really happy. Now what could I use this for....

photon · 10-22-2010, 08:20 AM

So here's a question, since I've never used AWS for anything yet. When they talk about hours, are they talking about hours that a thing is running, or hours that it's actually being used.

So for example if I make a site and put it in a virtual machine, and have the site up for a month... am I paying for 720 hours (or whatever that works out to), or am I paying for the hours that the site is actually being used? If it's idle then do I get charged for that?

I assume the answer is yes because no OS is truly idle, it's always doing something, but just checking.

fredr123 · 10-22-2010, 08:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cKy

I hate the cloud idea. The whole premise of it just bugs me. Stupid new buzz word of the year.

I recently saw this comment on a listserv where people were discussing alternative to using Microsoft Exchange in the office. Someone recommended Google Docs/Calendar/Gmail. Another posted something similar to your comments above but with a bit more vitriol to which a clear-headed posted eloquently replied:

Quote:

Cloud computing or Software as a Service (SAAS) is the FUTURE, not the past. And if you're savvy, it's your present.

Rathji · 10-22-2010, 08:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by photon

So here's a question, since I've never used AWS for anything yet. When they talk about hours, are they talking about hours that a thing is running, or hours that it's actually being used.

So for example if I make a site and put it in a virtual machine, and have the site up for a month... am I paying for 720 hours (or whatever that works out to), or am I paying for the hours that the site is actually being used? If it's idle then do I get charged for that?

I assume the answer is yes because no OS is truly idle, it's always doing something, but just checking.

The link you posted kind of answers question this indirectly.

Quote:

AWS Free Usage Tier (Per Month):
750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*

Barnes · 10-22-2010, 04:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by photon

So here's a question, since I've never used AWS for anything yet. When they talk about hours, are they talking about hours that a thing is running, or hours that it's actually being used.

So for example if I make a site and put it in a virtual machine, and have the site up for a month... am I paying for 720 hours (or whatever that works out to), or am I paying for the hours that the site is actually being used? If it's idle then do I get charged for that?

I assume the answer is yes because no OS is truly idle, it's always doing something, but just checking.

They charge by the hour but it looks like this would be enough hours torun one instance for one month. It's essentially the hours one server instance exists for.

Imagine CP running on AWS and Iginla gets for Crosby. You go in and start up two more server instances by launching two more Amazon Machine images to handle the spike in traffic for the next day or so. You pay for those instances for the amount of time you need them.

For our site, we pay a yearly lump sum that reduces that hourly cost if we need it.

photon · 10-22-2010, 06:05 PM

Yeah we looked at cloud hosting for CP for a while actually.. it's actually pretty cost effective for what it is, but still quite expensive for the budget we had.

sclitheroe · 10-23-2010, 10:13 AM

Does the Amazon AWS EC2 instance give you an actual Linux box you can SSH into?

Rathji · 10-23-2010, 10:41 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Does the Amazon AWS EC2 instance give you an actual Linux box you can SSH into?

http://ec2.subwiki.com/ec2/index.php/Main_Page

This seems to indicate you can.

Just reading more about this free usage tier, and it doesn't seem like it will let you use the Virtual Private Cloud, so you don't have the ability to connect to your network via VPN.

Is this correct or am I missing something?

Not that it matters really, but would be nice to test that out a bit.

Shazam · 11-06-2010, 09:58 AM

Just FYI, I ran two large instances on AWS last month, cost me about CAD$600.