Is it possible to have multiple users to manage an Amazon EC2 environment? I want to give access to several additional people to create machines on my existing billing account.
Amazon just announced AWS Identity and Access Management - http://aws.amazon.com/iam/
As of right now, it's in 'preview' mode, but this will allow you to have multiple AWS management accounts.
A few months ago Amazon announced Consolidated Billing. I never used it, but I think that is what you're looking for:
Consolidated Billing enables you to see a combined view of AWS costs incurred by all accounts in your department or company, as well as obtain a detailed cost report for each individual AWS account associated with your paying account. Consolidated Billing may also lower your overall costs since the rolled up usage across all of your accounts could help you reach lower-priced volume tiers more quickly.
Consolidated Billing Guide
This is absolutely possible using IAM service of AWS. With the help of IAM you can create users and give them specific permissions on various services of amazon.
You can try http://LabSlice.com. It's primarily for Virtual Lab Management (ie. playground environments), but may suit your needs.
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We have integrated AWS Billing invoices in Azure cost management such that in azure cost management, we can see the costs of all the AWS accounts we have in the root account along with Azure billing. Now we're removing our root account and every OU's we have in that root account is now associating with another root account. The new root account already has multiple OU inside which we have nothing to do with it.
My question is how can I set up the AWS Billing integration with Azure that takes AWS billing invoice of specific OU and send them over to Azure. as far as my understanding we can only set up integration with an AWS Root account or with an individual account, it doesn't operate on an OU level. I want this because I am only responsible to check billing invoices for my OU only or else it will show us the whole OU's billing we have in that root account and it will become much messier to track the cost down of my OU.
I don't find any documentation on this. so any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
I am not sure about that but your concern is to track bill across your AWS services and accounts you can use some external tools like CloudSpend
I recently had an EC2 instance that I terminated, I've deleted everything except for the Default Security Group which I am not allowed to delete. Note: I've deleted all the Inbound Rules and Outbound Rules. My bill still reflects EC2 charges which are by the hour. Do I need to worry about deleting this security group?
There is no charge applicable to Security Groups in Amazon EC2 / Amazon VPC.
You can drill-down into your billing charges via the Billing Dashboard. Just click Bill Details, expand the Elastic Compute Cloud section and a breakdown of charges will be displayed:
You should then be able to see the origin of your charges.
The AWS documentation says "f you terminate an underlying Amazon EC2 instance, the service that started it might interpret the termination as a failure and restart the instance."
So you could check on this,also check if you are using any services ,cost will be incurred if anything is launched using the services.
Are you using a free tier account?
The cost incurred is different if your free tier period is completed just a heads up.
Our company had multiple Amazon cloud accounts. Now my question is i want to monitor all account EC2 instances using Amazon AWS management console.
You can't... they all need to be on the same account for you to monitor them together with the AWS management console. I suggest using something like ElasticFox as it allows you to switch between accounts easily and has almost all the same functionality of the AWS Console. It lacks a few things like being able to assign permissions to AMI's and Volumes but for the most part it's pretty complete.
You can try Xervmon. They provide multi cloud management, you can add as many Amazon cloud accounts as you want and manage, monitor them with ease. We have used up to 5 different Amazon Cloud Accounts so far and it works great.
I currently try to implement amazon ec2 and I read that after one year they charge you. I used google app engine before(using java) and there is the feature that you can enable/disable charging. I just want to try the free ec2 instance, so here are my questions:
Does Amazon EC2 AUTOMATICALLY charge you after one year?
How to disable the automatically charging function?
I ended up closing my account by visiting the account page
At the bottom of the page you will find "close account"
It is currently not possible to disable charging. You might need to go over the free tier (for example if you setup a production environment, you might not want it to be killed automatically by amazon). Google App engine is a bit different because it is free if you have zero http requests, so it will just stop serving your app.
If you delete your credit card on your account, amazon will still charge it if there is an unpaid balance.
Amazon will not remind you that you will go over your free tier, so I would recommend to put a little reminder in one year on your calendar in one year to not forget to shutdown your server.
There is no way to control how much you will have to pay on AWS, that's why I wouldn't use it.
Amazon is really vague on the free tier (for instance it's not very clear whether the storage volume comes with the instance is counted against free EB2 storage quota). There are so many ways you can get a bill for using the free tier.
Yes you will be billed after 12 months, if you don't terminate all the instances and detach all storage volumes.
So many people have complained about Amazon's billing practice. Amazon has never changed. I guess this is the way Amazon decided to make $. Let you in for "free" but you will most likely accidentally spend some money. If you decide to use it, you won't know how much you will have to pay. If you have the capability to use colo/dedicated server, you might find out it's actually so much cheaper to go with a fixed monthly payment instead of billing based on usage.
With Amazon EC2, you are billed per hour of usage. If you are a new user, your account is credited with something like 8,760 free hours (24*365) which expire after 1 year. (I'm working from fuzzy memory here, so double-check the official terms instead of taking my word for it.)
After your free hours expire or are otherwise used up, Amazon EC2 will begin billing for normal hours (which can be as cheap as 2 cents per hour -- http://ec2instances.info). There is no such thing as a "free" EC2 instance.
So, to answer your questions:
Does Amazon EC2 AUTOMATICALLY charge you after one year?
Once your free hours are used up or expire, then you are automatically billed for normal hourly usage.
How to disable the automatically charging function?
You can't. All EC2 instances cost money. You are responsible for keeping an eye on your account and ensuring that you don't go over your free hours if you don't want to pay anything.
I was charged for a service that practically i never used.
a) Its true that Amazon never told you that the free tier is done. However, Amazon is prompty to charges you. Its my mistake but i admit that a little advice doesn't hurt, specially since practicaly everybody do that.
b) Even for a free tier, i wasn't impressed with the performance. I am owned a shared-hosting that are more powerful.
c) As some comments said, you can't delete your credit card, neither you can cancels the service. Its really low.
d) Finally,as some comment said, i closed my account. As far i can remember, its not tied with your Amazon (not cloud) account.
The service its so convoluted and overly complex, its filled with paid-traps and i am not impressed at all. Thanks Amazon but not thanks, i will stick with VPS/Dedicated.
You get 1 year of free usage http://aws.amazon.com/free/ .
Try reading AWS Free Usage Tier: http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-Guide-Usage-ebook/dp/B007Q4JESC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343213452&sr=8-1&keywords=aws+free+tier .
I know there are tools to manage your EC2 environment. I currently use the Eclipse Plugin and the iPhone app iAWSManager. What i'm looking for is a management service that allows you to create multiple users with roles and privileges. I have clients that sign up for EC2 but need help setting up and managing everything. At the very least they should be able to setup multiple logins so they can monitor who is doing what on the account (rather than sharing the single login). Better would be to assign privileges for who could create and launch an instance, create and assign/just assign Elastic IPs/EBS to instances etc.
Since enterprises are supposed to be using EC2 how do they manage this well? How do they create audit trails of activity?
RightScale, YLastic or EnStratus support roles and priviledges. However, they are not for free...
I'll add Scalr to the list, which is a cloud management software like RightScale (disclaimer: I work there). We released our permissions feature last January. It allows you to create different teams and environments and attribute them privileges on a granular basis. It means you can grant different permissions to different people. You can learn more on this blogpost.
Scalr is available as a hosted service which includes support. If you are looking for a free solution, you can download the source code, which is released under the Apache 2 license, and install it your self.
As mentioned earlier, RightScale and enStratus are two other alternatives.