How many instances can you run under the AWS Free Tier usage

The free usage tier on Amazon is a nice and convenient way for a quick check how AWS cloud works. But if you overuse it at the end of the months are will have to pay the bill that they sent you.

For example in the free tier [1] you have:

750 hours of EC2 running Linux/Unix Micro instance usage

That practically means you can have a one single tiny instance for a month for free. But every next will add to your monthly bill. That means that if you leave two instances to run over a month will have a similar bill to pay.

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$17.71AWS Service Charges Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud  Download Usage Report » $14.76 US East (Northern Virginia) Region Amazon EC2 running Linux/UNIX $0.00 per Micro Instance (t1.micro) instance-hour (or partial hour) under monthly free tier 750 Hrs 0.00 $0.020 per Micro Instance (t1.micro) instance-hour (or partial hour) 738 Hrs 14.76 Amazon EC2 EBS $0.00 per GB-month of provisioned storage under monthly free tier 16.000 GB-Mo 0.00 $0.00 per 1 million I/O requests under monthly free tier 240,182 IOs 0.00 Amazon CloudWatch $0.00 per metric-month - first 10 metrics 7.000 Metrics 0.00 AWS Data Transfer (excluding Amazon CloudFront) $0.00   VAT to be collected $2.95   GST to be collected $0.00   US Tax to be collected $0.00

References

1. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

What IP addresses are initialy assigned on a new cloud server

I have spun up a standard tiny/small cloud server using the Amazon Cloud Console, Rackspace Cloud Control Panel and the HP Management Console [1]. We can see that for every vendors the provisioned cloud servers have different network settings.

Problem

What is a standard IP and routing configuration on a freshly built cloud server.

Solution

1. Rackspace


Example network config for Rackspace NextGen cloud server



root@manage2:~# ip a
1: lo: LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP mtu 16436 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: eth0: BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP qlen 1000
    link/ether bc:76:4e:08:07:f4 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 5.79.xx.yy/24 brd 5.79.xx.yy scope global eth0
    inet6 2a00:1a48:7805:111:8cfc:xxx:yyy:zzz/64 scope global
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 fe80::be76:aaa:bbb:ccc/64 scope link
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
3: eth1:  BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP  mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP qlen 1000
    link/ether bc:76:4e:08:04:39 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 10.178.195.rrr/18 brd 10.178.255.255 scope global eth1
    inet6 fe80::be76:4eff:rrrr:sss/64 scope link
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

root@manage2:~# ip route
default via 5.79.21.1 dev eth0  metric 100
5.79.21.0/24 dev eth0  proto kernel  scope link  src 5.79.aa.bbb
10.176.0.0/12 via 10.178.192.1 dev eth1
10.178.192.0/18 dev eth1  proto kernel  scope link  src 10.178.195.191




2. Amazon

Example network config for Amazon EC2 cloud server



ubuntu@ip-10-203-43-168:~$ ip a
1: lo:  LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP  mtu 16436 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: eth0:  BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP  mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP qlen 1000
    link/ether 12:31:3b:09:28:5a brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 10.203.43.168/23 brd 10.203.43.255 scope global eth0
    inet6 fe80::1031:3bff:fe09:285a/64 scope link
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

ubuntu@ip-10-203-43-168:~$ ip route
default via 10.203.42.1 dev eth0  metric 100
10.203.42.0/23 dev eth0  proto kernel  scope link  src 10.203.43.168




3. HP Cloud

Example network config for HP Openstack cloud server

[root@server-1352331143-az-3-region-a-geo-1 ~]# ip a
1: lo:  LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP  mtu 16436 qdisc noqueue
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: eth0:  BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP  mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 1000
    link/ether 02:16:3e:70:b7:9e brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 10.2.0.219/15 brd 10.3.255.255 scope global eth0
    inet6 fe80::16:3eff:aaaa:bbbb/64 scope link
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
3: sit0:  NOARP  mtu 1480 qdisc noop
    link/sit 0.0.0.0 brd 0.0.0.0

[root@server-1352331143-az-3-region-a-geo-1 ~]# ip route
169.254.0.0/16 dev eth0  scope link
10.2.0.0/15 dev eth0  proto kernel  scope link  src 10.2.0.219
default via 10.2.0.1 dev eth0

References

http://rtomaszewski.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/links-to-cloud-provider-web-management.html http://aws.amazon.com/free/

Easy of use and learning curve for Rackspace or Amazon Cloud

Even though Rackspace and Amazon provide similar tools and products they both are built on different principles and have a different agenda and mission.

As expected this is going to shape the company image, product and services offerings. As there are countless metrics and ways to compare I would like to take a look at the user experience and evaluate a easy of use only.

You can learn and experience this yourself when setting up a simple test infrastructural build of Apache Web Server, MySql Database and Tomcat Applicatin Server. Alternatively we can learn from other and these 2 blog posts representing a very interesting summary:

Amazon and Rackspace: A Comparison, Part 2
Amazon and Rackspace: A Comparison, Part 1

A short summary:
Rackspace cloud is easier to use when interacting with cloud for the first time. The emphasis is on simplicity rather then elasticity and richness of features.

Amazon is much more mature and feature full. Unfortunately this leads to a longer learning curve and requires more knowledge when building your own infrastructure.

How big is the Amazon cloud infrastructure

There are constantly new players emerging in the cloud market space. The choice between what vendor or provider I want to use is  becoming more and more difficult.

Before I decide to go with one or another vendor I always try to do a small research to find out what is the current market share, how big a provider is, how reliable or even popular it is among user. Below is an interesting graph showing some stats for  Amazon cloud. This data has been taken from : Infographic: Demystifying Amazon Web Services