EC2 and the AWS (Amazon Web Services) Free Tier - My First Experience

The Amazon Web Services Management Console

I had my first go-round with EC2 in AWS this last week in a real-life context.  I was teaching a class on Content Management Systems at SAIT, and I wanted my students to experience what its like to install WordPress and MySQL on a Linux VM.  I also wanted to personally get some experience with AWS, so I thought 'why not kill two birds with one stone?'

About 6 weeks ago I had purchased Amazon Web Services IN ACTION, written by Andreas and Michael Wittig and published by Manning.  It gave me a great primer on setting up my AWS account, my Billing Alert, and my first couple of VM's.  I leveraged that experience, crossed my fingers, spun up 18 VM's for my students, and hoped I wouldn't get charged a mint for having them running 24/7 for a few days.  It was a Friday around 1pm when I created them and gave them to my students to use.  Imagine my surprise when I checked my billing page in AWS on Monday and discovered they had only charged me $2.81!

I had clearly reached some kind of threshold as after that day I got charged, on average, about $8/day - for all 18 VM's.  They were charging me 2 cents per hour per VM, and some small data transfers.  Granted, I used a 'T1 Micro' - with 1 CPU, .613 Gib memory and 8 GiB storage.  Still, I was quite happy.

On the last day of class, I split the students up into two teams and gave them large web projects to do, and spun up a 'T1 Micro' for each team.  I gave them some scripts they could run to create some swap memory if they needed it.  They ran those scripts right away, and within an hour (with 9 people uploading files and content into those systems continuously) those T1 Micros CPUs pinned.  So I quickly imaged them over lunch and spun up an 'M3 Large' VMs (2 CPU's, 7.5 GiB memory) for each team and threw their images on.  I ran into one issue spinning up the new team VM's - I had to spin down the original Team VM's first before I could start the new ones because there is a limit/quota of 20 VMs on the 'free-tier' in AWS.   Aside from that and the changed IP addresses, the transition was seamless.  I was a happy camper and now that the students had responsive VM's, so were they.

My total bill for the week - $38!  A colleague pointed out that I probably could have added auto-scaling to those team VM's and increase the CPU and memory in place, without losing the current IP's.  He's right, I probably could have, but I didn't have the experience and didn't want to waste class time (and potentially lose the student's work) by trying something I didn't know how to do.  All in all, I was very impressed with my first run of EC2 in AWS.  It was very reasonable, responsive, and easy to use.  I'd definitely do it again.