AWS - want EC2 to stay permanently up

allycavs

Hi

Im trying to understand AWS free tier. I have spun up some ec2 instances. And also a RDS database

My question is, if I want to leave these instances permanently up , is this free and what ec2 instances stay permanently up?

Thanks
Alan

Singer

For EC2, the free tier covers one Linux and one Windows t2.micro for a year.

For RDS, the free tier covers on db.t2.micro for a year.

Full details here:
https://aws.amazon.com/free/

Generally speaking, EC2 instances stay up but can fail or be replaced, just like any other computer. Same with an EBS volume. Your Milage May Vary. Back up important stuff to S3 or whatever.

allycavs

Singer wrote: »

For EC2, the free tier covers one Linux and one Windows t2.micro for a year.

For RDS, the free tier covers on db.t2.micro for a year.

Full details here:
https://aws.amazon.com/free/

Generally speaking, EC2 instances stay up but can fail or be replaced, just like any other computer. Same with an EBS volume. Your Milage May Vary. Back up important stuff to S3 or whatever.

So how come any time I spin up a instance. And I log in next day, it's not there. Im not terminating or removing these instances

deconduo

allycavs wrote: »

So how come any time I spin up a instance. And I log in next day, it's not there. Im not terminating or removing these instances

Are you sure you're in the same region each time? I'd recommend checking the different regions to make sure you're not running instances that you don't realise - especially as these could take you out of the free tier.

Jaden

Set Up Billing Alerts.
Now.

allycavs

Jaden wrote: »

Set Up Billing Alerts.
Now.

Ok thanks. I will set up bill allerts. My first VM was in the states and I shut that down..all other stuff has been spun up under Ireland. Im pretty sure but I will double check .

Jaden

Setup a VPC (non default one) in eu-west-1 (Ireland).

Put your stuff in there.

Use Cloudtrail to determine why things are being turned off.

Singer

All the above is good advice! I hope you're not leaving random servers running in random regions

If the host is mysteriously going away in the region you're in, it could be that the host failed EC2 health checks and was terminated. If you're running a resource hungry application that ends up using over a gig of RAM, then it might be too big for the poor old t2.micro instance, and it might be automatically terminated by AWS depending on the health check settings. Cloudtrail might well be able to tell you what's going on here, though so might Autoscaling group logs (if you're using them) or ELB metrics (also if you're using them).

It's a shame that people have to worry about the likes of Cloudtrail to just get started with some basic use of AWS. Don't get me wrong, I really like Cloudtrail, IAM, VPCs etc. and work with them all the time, but they present a pretty high bar of complexity just to get a running server.