My dive into the world of Amazon EC2 and the new crazy cheap Micro instance

September 22, 2010 | By

I heard about Amazon EC2 when it launched in 2006 but had never really checked it out until about four weeks ago when I was looking for at my options for hosting some demos that require more control over the machine than what a typical hosting company provides.  One of my fellow evangelists, James Ward, gave me a one hour tour of EC2 and educated me on the sometimes confusing terminology that EC2 experts take for granted.  Things like “elastic IP”, “AMIs”, “instances”, “spot instances”, “reserved instances”, “CPU units”, etc.  It’s a bit intimidating and confusing at first glance, but it quickly comes into focus. I then talked to another co-worker Marcel Boucher who is deeply involved in LiveCycle Express, our EC2-based cloud offering of LiveCycle ES2 and got some more real-world knowledge on EC2.

I don’t think the 4 or 5 hours I’ve invested in learning EC2 qualifies me as an expert, so I’m not proposing that this video is a “tutorial”.  There are plenty of good tutorials that I’ll point you to below.  However, I am excited about what I’ve learned and thought that readers would enjoy a 10 minute briefing that will give you a good sampling of what EC2 is all about.  Not everyone has EC2 experts on speed dial so here’s the next best thing.  The gadget guy in me loved this experience.  It’s like going to the computer store, buying a bunch of hardware to play with and returning it at the end of the day.  You can literally spend an entire day playing with EC2 for less than $1!

Below is a video I recorded that walks through a brief explanation of EC2 and walks through a live demo of creating a new instance from scratch, setting up security, starting the instance, logging in and installing Apache.  I go from nothing to a public facing ready to go server in the cloud in 6 minutes.

The links in the video can be found at http://gregsramblings.com/ec2

UPDATE 09/29/2010:

I’ve had my instance up and running for 11 days. Below is my bill so far for 11 days:

ec2 price micro




Filed in: Amazon EC2, Cool Technology, Ramblings | Tags: , , ,

About the Author (Author Profile)

Greg is an Adobe Creative Cloud Evangelist based in Tampa, Florida

Comments (18)

Links to this Post

  1. My dive into the world of Amazon EC2 and the new crazy cheap Micro instance (Adobe Flash Platform Blog) | September 28, 2010
  2. Distributing content world wide using Amazon CloudFront « Greg Wilson's Ramblings | October 5, 2010
  3. Test Driving An Amazon EC2 Micro Instance « A Passion for Research | October 17, 2010
  4. Distributing content world wide using Amazon CloudFront | Greg's Ramblings | January 28, 2011
  5. How and why I moved my blog to Amazon EC2 from WordPress.com | Greg's Ramblings | January 31, 2011
  2. Douglas McCarroll

    Hi Greg – I’m having trouble finding any real information on setting up Spring with BlazeDS integration on EC2. Even something that would confirm that it is possible… Do you know anything about this? Can you suggest any resources?

    Douglas McCarroll

    September 25, 2010 at 6:05 am
  3. Rob Morgan

    Thanks Greg, that post was very helpful!

    Regards,

    Rob

    October 8, 2010 at 9:17 am
  5. Daniel

    Thanks for the video!

    January 26, 2011 at 3:53 pm
  6. johans

    Nice explanation – I’ll give it a go!

    Thanks

    February 8, 2011 at 6:05 pm
  7. johans

    Greg – when you stop the instance do you still incur hourly charge? From EC2 FAQ I found you are billed when instance is in “running” state so I assume you can use stop and not have to terminate to halt any billing.

    Thanks

    February 8, 2011 at 10:46 pm
    • Greg Wilson

      Hey Johans – you are only billed for the instance while it is running. Assuming you have an EBS instance, you can stop it and halt the billing….BUT…you’ll still be billed for the used disk space, but it’s only pennys.

      Greg

      February 9, 2011 at 1:31 am
  8. Mike

    New to EC2 , just wondering , once I have my instance running with new website, I have to keep this instance running so that my website can be viewed on www? What is difference between stop and terminate

    August 7, 2011 at 9:47 am
  9. Juan Granados

    You can save even more money if you use a micro-instance as a reserved instance. Your intial 1 year cost is $54, but it drops your per hour charge to $.007 vs $.02.

    September 28, 2011 at 3:52 pm
  10. Dave Adams

    Does anyone know if you have to pay extra for any of the non Amazon Linux AMIs? For example, Greg uses an Ubuntu AMI for his demos but does this AMI cost extra?

    Thanks for all the dialogue on this subject.

    December 6, 2011 at 10:14 am
  11. Paul Myers

    Great Demo – is to follow and understand. I used it as a reference multiple times
    Thanks Greg!

    January 10, 2012 at 1:55 pm
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