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AWS free usage tier: Not quite free for popular AMIs
Posted by: Eric Hammond
Posted on: Oct 27, 2010 2:04 PM
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Amazon:

Congrats on the upcoming launch of the AWS Free Usage Tier:

http://aws.amazon.com/free/

Even though I think AWS is ridiculously cheap for most people to try out, having that "free" word out there is sure to get more people to dip their toes in.

There is one problem with the offer parameters that I think could be fairly easy for Amazon to fix:

The offer includes "10 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage" which presumably is intended to be applied to the EBS root disk for the t1.micro instance. Unfortunately, a number of the popular EBS boot AMIs come with a minimum of 15GB of disk, meaning that they cannot be run for free.

This cost of $0.50 ($0.55 for some regions) per month could be considered laughable, but when the promotion is listed as "free" and there's no way to run an Ubuntu AMI or even an Amazon-provided SUSE AMI without getting charged, then there are bound to be some questions and perhaps ill-will.

Please consider raising the EBS volume limit slightly to 15GB to ease this little annoyance and make the AWS Free Usage Tier that much more successful.

--
Eric Hammond
http://alestic.com
Permlink Replies: 6 | Pages: 1 - Last Post: Nov 1, 2010 5:49 PM by: Andrew
Replies
Re: AWS free usage tier: Not quite free for popular AMIs
Posted by: Eric Hammond
Posted on: Oct 27, 2010 5:47 PM
in response to: Eric Hammond in response to: Eric Hammond
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I did a quick survey of the sizes of public EBS boot AMIs in us-east-1.

<blockquote>
25% of AMIs are 10GB or less
60% of AMIs are 15GB or less
92% of AMIs are 30GB or less
</blockquote>

I know that this does not necessarily relate to which AMIs folks are going to run; but all of the Ubuntu EBS boot AMIs provided by Canonical are 15GB, which, for folks who know me, are obviously the ones I care the most about :)

I noticed that the Amazon-provided CentOS EBS boot AMIs are 30GB, though they aren't intended for this free trial being HVM.

--
Eric Hammond
http://alestic.com

Re: AWS free usage tier: Not quite free for popular AMIs
Posted by: NathanT@AWS
Posted on: Oct 28, 2010 3:01 PM
in response to: Eric Hammond in response to: Eric Hammond
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Eric,

Thank you for calling this limitation in the free usage tier out.  It is important for AWS users to understand that some AMIs they can launch will not be available for free through the new free usage tier.  This includes paid AMIs such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as well as some AMIs whose size exceeds the EBS free size limit.  Many of the most popular AMIs, including the Rightscale CentOS AMIs and the Amazon Linux AMI are 10GB or less in size and should incur no EBS usage fees in the free usage tier in their default configuration. 
Re: AWS free usage tier: Not quite free for popular AMIs
Posted by: Eric Hammond
Posted on: Oct 28, 2010 3:16 PM
in response to: NathanT@AWS in response to: NathanT@AWS
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NathanT: Thanks for your reply.

Please consider raising the limit to 15G so that the Ubuntu community can help promote the AWS free usage tier with clear, uncomplicated language (i.e., "free").

I would be shocked if this increase caused a material financial impact on Amazon's bottom line with this promotion. We all know that anybody who tries the free tier and likes AWS is going to end up paying substantially more as they move above a t1.micro to get real work done.

Historical note: Ubuntu EBS boot AMIs are 15GB because I and Canonical followed Amazon's initial example. The first EBS boot Fedora AMis released by Amazon were 15GB, and we used the same size as the de facto standard.

--
Eric Hammond
Re: AWS free usage tier: Not quite free for popular AMIs
Posted by: R. Wood RealName(TM)
Posted on: Nov 1, 2010 8:04 AM
in response to: Eric Hammond in response to: Eric Hammond
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Why would you use EBS for booting and not the 160GB of local storage that is associated with the instance? I was planning on using the EBS allocation for database storage to persist between instances.

Since I am new to EC2, am I to understand that any AMI I adopt will automatically need to be stored in EBS? Or is this the case for ones that I need to store after customization?
Re: AWS free usage tier: Not quite free for popular AMIs
Posted by: R. Wood RealName(TM)
Posted on: Nov 1, 2010 8:37 AM
in response to: R. Wood in response to: R. Wood
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Never mind, I looked at the FAQ, which I should have done in the first place. EBS if I want to be able to turn my instance on and off without losing its state.
Re: AWS free usage tier: Not quite free for popular AMIs
Posted by: Andrew
Posted on: Nov 1, 2010 5:49 PM
in response to: NathanT@AWS in response to: NathanT@AWS
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Just to clarify, are we talking about GB-months here or a GB max? For instance if I run Eric's 15G AMI for 50% of the month and then delete the volume, will I still fall under the free tier?

All of the wording simply says "10GB" so it's hard to tell.

Thanks