amazon-aws-free-tier-install-linux
"Free EC2 Linux Micro Instance + ELB + 10GB EBS storage + 5GB S3 storage + 30 GB traffic"
Is Amazon's offer too good to be true? I put my Credit Card on the line to find out what "free" means...
First, remember that Jeff Bezos didn't go broke with this crazy "sell stuff on the internet" scheme way back when so there's obviously a way Amazon profit from giving away some services.
"Mind share" of developers is increasingly attractive (Mobile App Store anybody?).
The first catch, any "machine" you run in Amazon must be an "Amazon Machine Image" (AMI).
So, all of Amazon's defaults are 15GB ... which means you will be incurring a small charge EDIT: Amazon Quick Start Basic Linux Instances are now 10GB (ami-d40e5e91)
Or use one from Ubuntu https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EC2StartersGuide
Otherwise you may enjoy creating your own AMI... but you can only create an AMI from an existing AMI.
NOTE: you're more likely to need/use an "EBS backed AMI" which behaves more like a hard drive...
Click on Launch Instance ... My AMI choice, Ubu 10.04 LTS 64 bit ami-b37e2ef6
CAREFUL, the default Instance size is Large (hmmm... wonder why)
So 1 Micro (t1.micro, 613MB) (no Spot needed, thanks!) Kernel ID & RAM Disk ID default (why not?)
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/2010-11-15/GettingStartedGuide/
750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) - enough hours to run continuously each month*
750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing*
10 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 1 million I/Os, 1 GB of snapshot storage, 10,000 snapshot Get Requests and 1,000 snapshot Put Requests*
5 GB of Amazon S3 storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests*
30 GB per of internet data transfer (15 GB of data transfer "in" and 15 GB of data transfer "out" across all services except Amazon CloudFront)*
Amazon have a long explanation of a Micro Instance ... but really, the name says it all... http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/2010-11-15/UserGuide/index.html?concepts_micro_instances.html
Design the AMI to run on 600 MB of RAM (e.g. use swap on your EBS) Limit the number of recurring processes that use CPU time (e.g., cron jobs, daemons)
EBS backed stopped = will probably not retain its public and private IP addresses
elastic IP address that was mapped to the instance is unmapped
instance start requires manually remapping the elastic IP address to the instance; it doesn't happen automatically