[colug-432] shell account hosting?

[Judd Montgomery]

On 01/20/2012 12:00 AM, Rick Hornsby wrote:
> > From what I gathered they charge by uptime, not CPU cycles.  When you take it down, your instance and everything in it is destroyed.
>
> I could be wrong tho.
>
AWS charges for uptime rounded to the highest hour, network, Elastic 
Block Storage (EBS), S3 and other things if you use them.  An instance 
store instance (the root drive is on the host) can't be "stopped".  You 
can terminate it and lose everything.  An EBS backed image you can stop 
and it will not lose what is on the root drive, but will lose the larger 
disk mounted at /mnt.  You can get around this by mounting another EBS 
volume if you need a larger persistent drive.  You will be charged for 
10 cents per million I/O requests on an EBS volume (including the root 
drive of an EBS backed instance).

If you want an instance store image you can quickly start an image, use 
it for as long as you need and terminate it.  You can use puppet or chef 
to configure it as needed upon boot.  You can also configure it the way 
you want and then create your own image.  This can be started quickly, 
used and then terminated.  You can store stuff on an EBS volume and keep 
it around with or without an EBS image.  There are storage charges for 
instance images, which are stored in S3 (based on size and time) and for 
EBS (based on I/O, size and time).

With either of these types you will get a different IP address on restart.

I've found EBS volumes to be much slower than instance store, although 
AWS will tell you it is similar.  Don't believe it for now.

AWS oversubscribes everything.  You'll find that during the work day 
everything slows down, the CPU, the network, the disk.  The larger 
machine you purchase the less you'll notice this.  You should pay 
attention to the "I/O performance" listed for a particular instance type 
if you need the network and disk to be fast.

One thing I really like at AWS is the "spot instances".  They are 
charged at a variable market rate and if the rate goes over your bid 
then it gets terminated, no advance notice, it just goes away.  I've 
started up larger instances and ran them for months at 1/5 or so of the 
normal rate.  What I have noticed is that these can take hours to start 
and seem to get killed every once in a while when the asking price does 
not exceed my limit.  I suspect this is just to keep people from using 
them for on-demand processing and for long term, but I could be totally 
wrong.

Judd