Hours in Amazon Free Instances - amazon-ec2

I'm using a Amazon Free Instance in EC2.
So, I have 750 hours/month to spend one year long.
My question is: If I run 2 instances at the same time I'll spend 2x the number of hours?

Correct. Every instance is billed per-hour.
However, if you run a Linux AMI and Windows AMI at the same time you get 750 free hours for each.

Related

How can i scale up an amazon ec2 instance quickly, in 2-3 mins?

I'm using AWS cloudwatch for scaling my application. I created launch configuration, autoscaling group, upscaling and downscaling alarm and policies. The problem is it is taking 5 mins to launch an instance from an AMI. Is there a way to reduce the start-up time from 5 to 2-3 mins?
No, it isn't possible to speed up the provisioning of a new EC2 instance by an AutoScaling scale up action.
I think it's important to appreciate all that EC2 is doing in those 5 minutes. It's building a new virtual machine, installing an image of an operating system on it, hooking it up to a network and bringing it into service. That's pretty impressive for 5 minutes work if you ask me.
If you're needing to scale up that quickly, then quite frankly you're doing it wrong. Even with autoscaling, you should always be a little over provisioned for your expected load. If you start getting close to that over scaled limit, then it's time to autoscale up. Don't provision exactly what you need, it won't work well.
The start up time depends on a few things:
The availability of resources for your instance type within the
availability zone.
The size of the AMI. In the case of a custom AMI image, it may need to be copied to the correct internal storage for the VM.
Initialization procedures. For windows, some images with user-data scripts can require a reboot to join the domain.
This is an old question, and as I have seen. Start times have improved for EC2 over the past years. Some providers like Google Cloud can provide servers in under a minute. So if your workload is that demanding, you may research the available providers and their operational differences.

Amazon EC2 - Fast AMI Creation in a Production Environment

We run a server architecture where we have an X number of base servers which are always on. Our servers process jobs sent to them and the vast majority of our job requests come in during the workday. To facilitate this particular spike in volume, we use EC2 auto-scaling.
I prefer to launch servers through auto-scaling with as much of a configured AMI as possible as opposed to launching from a base AMI and installing packages through long Chef or Puppet scripts.
In our current build process, we implement changes to our code base late at night when only our base servers are needed and no servers are launched through auto-scaling. But every once in a while, we'll have a critical bug fix that needs to be implemented immediately during the day.
We have a rather large EBS hard drive associated with our servers (app. 400 GB) and AMI creation of a base server with the latest changes usually takes upwards of one hour. This isn't a problem for late night deployments when no additional servers need to be launched, but causes us to lose valuable time during the day because it prevents us from launching additional servers when the latest AMI isn't ready.
Is there anything out there which can speed up the AMI creation process here? I've heard of Netflix's Aminator and Boxfuse, but are there any other alternatives? Also, how do these services stack up against one another?

Stopping an Amazon EC2 Instance

If I stop an instance, I understand that I am not charged. However, I've installed several items on my machine in the last few hours (Mysql uploaded a db, Apache, PHP, etc...). I assume that when I stop the instance I retain these software installations, correct? Are these things stored in EBS? If so, where is the pricing listed for EBS, as I guess I will be charged every hour of every day for the whole year for my EBS storage given that it can never "stop"...
Thanks in advance.
From http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/, the current rates are:
$0.10 per GB-month of provisioned storage
$0.10 per 1 million I/O requests
Your data will persist if the root device is EBS backed, which is default now. You can check in the EC2 control panel.
So stopping the instance (if 8GB EBS) will cost about $0.80 per month for storage if it is never running.
If your instance is EBS backed all data is safe. You will be charged for EBS storage only. Amazon EBS storage charged on per-month basis. Currently it's $0.10 per GB-month.

Amazon EC2 virtualization with VMware

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing
I can't understand this. What is an instance? ("On-Demand Instances let you pay for compute capacity by the hour with no long-term commitments.")
Does this mean that I can use whole as my VMware server:
(Extra Large Instance)
15 GB memory
8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
1,690 GB instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
API name: m1.xlarge
For $0.96 per hour?
Or does it mean only like one operation or something? What is that instance exactly?
An instance signifies an operating system instance (a virtual machine). By using virtualization, Amazon (and cloud providers in general) offer you a virtualized environment where OS instances are running. You have full control over that operating system inside that environment. Per hour means that you pay that much for using your OS instance resources for a single hour. I believe that page has almost all the details about pricing.
An instance is a virtual machine. For example you can start up an ubuntu instance and then you can SSH into it and do whatever you want.

In Amazon Web Service ec2 why it require 15 min to generate password?

while using AWS ec2
when i try to launch windows server 2003 instance it give me massage that please wait for 15 min.Actually password generated after 25 min
Why this is happen ?
please help.
Regards,
Tushar
There's quite a lot going on behind the scenes when you launch an EC2 instance, and host load, network load and Windows itself can all increase the amount of time it takes between clicking 'Launch' and having the password generated and ready for extraction.
15 minutes is the 'usual' amount of time it can take, but I've had VMs take 20-30 minutes to go from cold to ready-to-use. It's the nature of the environment that your VMs run in - sometimes it just takes a bit longer.

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