I’m looking to use a cloud computing instance which will give me best value for my particular use case.
What I need to do is fire off a script periodically which performs some actions via selenium.
My questions are:
Will the packages installed be “remembered” if I reboot the instance?
Does the instance even need to be rebooted sometimes?
Do I get persistent storage or something else?
Am I charged when my instance is running but idle (between cron jobs)?
Any recommendations on which type of service would provide best value for my use case.
EDIT: I made some edits because I offended people by mentioning specific vendors and asking about pricing. The question probably could have been worded better initially but what I really wanted to know was which cloud computing solutions would be best value for a particular use case which seems to be a bit niche.
I'm with GCP Support team, so I will provide information on Google Cloud’s part.
Google Cloud Compute Engine offers a free usage for an amount up to a specific limit.
Will the packages installed be “remembered” if I reboot the instance? Do I get persistent storage or something else?
When you create a new VM instance you get assigned at least 10 Gb of persistent disk. Everything that is stored on that disk will stay there even in case of rebooting the instance.
Does the instance even need to be rebooted sometimes?
Instances doesn’t have to be rebooted unless you want so. However, occasionally they get rebooted automatically by the Google Compute Engine service.
Am I charged when my instance is running but idle (between cron jobs)?
You are charged for the instance when it is up and running. You can find more information about Google Cloud Compute pricing here.
To have an approximation of what you will be paying, based on what you will be using, you can use GCP Pricing Calculator.
After some investigation I found a couple of suitable options for running a selenium script a few times a day.
1) GCP, which as mentioned in another answer has a free tier.
2) AWS provides lambdas for running code without needing to provision servers. They also provide a free tier and I found some pre-compiled AWS lambda packages using Python + Selenium and some pretty clear instructions on how to get them running in AWS on a schedule: https://github.com/ryfeus/lambda-packs.
Related
I am new to AWS and recently set up a free t3.micro instance. My goal is to achieve a stable hosting of an Angular application with 2 spring boot services. I got everything working, but after a while, the spring boot services are not reachable anymore. When i redeploy the service it will run again. The spring boot services are packed as jar and after the deployment the process is started as a java process.
I thought AWS guarantees permanent availability out of the box. Do i need some more setup such as autoscaling to achieve the desired uptime of the services or is the t3.micro instance not suffienciently performant, so that i need to upgrade to a stronger instance to avoid the problem?
It depends :)
I think you did the right thing by starting with a small instance type and avoid over provisioning in the first place. T3 instance types are generally beneficial for 'burst' usage scenarios i.e. your application sporadically needs a compute spike but not a persistent one. T3 instance types usually work with credits based system, where you instance 'earns' credits when it is idle, and that buffer is always available in times of need (but only until consumed entirely). Then you need to wait for some time window again and earn the credits back.
For your current problem, I think first approach can be to get an idea of the current usage by going through the 'Monitoring' tab on the EC2 instance details page. This will help you understand if the needs are more compute related or i/o related and then you can choose an appropriate instance type from :
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types
Next step could also be to profile your application and understand the memory, compute utilisation better. AWS does guarantee availability/durability of resources, but how you consume those resources is more of an application thing, which AWS does not guarantee/control
For your ideas around, autoscaling and availability, it again depends on what your needs are in terms of cost, outages in AWS data centres etc. To have a reliable production setup, you could consider them, but not something really important in the first place.
I have a very basic idea on servers. So far I have only worked with few Ubuntu VPS server which I can easily maintain, install a database, upload my code and run my projects. And to save static data like image/video I use local SSD storage of my server.
Now I got some projects where AWS is required to use. In the beginning, I thought it would be very similar to my normal Ubuntu based VPS server. But while I start researching/reading articles also their own docs I find out it has lots more cool features for server and at the same, it's little complicated for a beginner. I would be really glad if someone give his time and reply on these questions of mine to clear concept about AWS of mine and people like me
As my plan is to use one EC2 instance to run my project. But I can see many experts suggest to use Elastic Beanstalk and create EC2 instance inside that. While I can directly run my project with EC2 without taking help from Elastic Beanstalk. So why it's better / what other help do it(Elastic Beanstalk) provide?
When I am checking the pricing of EC2(On-demand > Linux Unix) it says ECU as Variable. What does that mean? And where does ECU work
Instance Storage (GB) as EBS only. Does that mean I can't have any storage with my server I must buy separately? But in my previous VPS server, I use to get fewer storages with my server. Because storage is required if I want to install new software like MySQL/Redis/Python each of them requires local storage. Also if I want to upload my code or few static images it requires storage.
Like storage do I also need to buy other instances for a database? Like if I want to use PostgreSQL as my database do I need to buy AWS RDS or I can install that inside my Linux system?
Lastly, what are the main differences of my normal VPS Linux server and in AWS EC2 Linux server?
Thanks in advance for giving time :)
Let me try to answer your questions inline.
As my plan is to use one EC2 instance to run my project. But I can
see many experts suggest to use Elastic Beanstalk and create EC2
instance inside that. While I can directly run my project with EC2
without taking help from Elastic Beanstalk. So why it's better /
what other help do it(Elastic Beanstalk) provide?
If you are planning to use a single server and a database going with EC2 and RDS would be straightforward. However, if you are planning to set up, autoscaling (automatically increasing the number of servers only when load increases and return back to one server), load balancing and DevOps support, you need to set them up which requires more knowledge on AWS platform. AWS Elastic Beanstalk does these for you automatically, also by giving you the options to select the technology of your application and simply upload the code.
When I am checking the pricing of EC2(On-demand > Linux Unix) it says ECU as Variable. What does that mean? And where does ECU work
ECU is simply a rough figure to compare the processing across multiple EC2 classes that are having the different levels processing power.
Instance Storage (GB) as EBS only. Does that mean I can't have any storage with my server I must buy separately? But in my previous VPS server, I use to get fewer storages with my server. Because storage is required if I want to install new software like MySQL/Redis/Python each of them requires local storage. Also if I want to upload my code or few static images it requires storage.
EBS storage is reliable storage (With internal redundancy) that will last beyond your instance lifetime. Which means, you can upgrade the EC2 class and install software, or store files, which will remain in the EBS volume unless you delete it.
Since you are basically paying for the GBs, you can also create another EBS volume for static files and mount it to the EC2 instance if you want.
Like storage do I also need to buy other instances for a database? Like if I want to use PostgreSQL as my database do I need to buy AWS RDS or I can install that inside my Linux system?
It's not mandatory but recommended since you can even use a smaller instance for a web server and use another one for the DB. It's up to you. For example, the cost would be roughly similar if you use two small EC2 instances for a web server and DB server (Or use RDS) or use a single medium-size EC2 instance where both DB and web is running.
Lastly what are the main differences of my normal VPS Linux server and in AWS EC2 Linux server?
You will get more options in terms of selecting the hardware underneath since AWS provides different configuration options. In addition, EC2 instances are able to utilize the AWS ecosystem for Networking, Security, Load balancing & etc for better-optimized solution architectures in terms of reliability, security, performance & etc.
Q1) Beanstalk is a management application. AWS has several: CloudFormation, OpsWorks. Third party vendors have their own: Chef, Ansible, Terraform, etc. I really like Beanstalk and how it makes deploying code very easy for small sites (one command). I can scale up or scale down with a button push. I also use CloudFormation every day for just about everything.
Q2) ECU is a AWS Equivalent Compute Unit used to compare one instance with another. How does that translate to physical CPUs? Don't know as AWS does not publish its absolute meaning. Use is only to compare EC2 instances.
Q3) When you launch an EC2 instance, you will need storage. This is an additional cost (around $0.10 per GB per month). You will specify the size and type of storage (there are a number of types). There is also Instance Store Volumes. Stay away from these unless you really understand how to use them (they don't persist a shutdown so all data is lost). There are good use cases for Instance Store (AI, Big Data, Image processing), but a website is not one of them.
Q4) If your EC2 instance is big enough (2 GB of memory and larger), you can install PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc on your EC2 instance. Otherwise AWS has a number of database optios: DynamoDB, RDS, Aurora, etc.
Q5) Difficult to answer as each vendor offers its own set of features. EC2 instances are virtual machines. You have control over the raw power of that VM. Most VPS servers have management interfaces that EC2 does not. Usually EC2 is more expensive than VPS servers.
Watch a couple of AWS videos on YouTube. This will help you to understand AWS and why it is so successful in the cloud. Linux Academy, A Cloud Guru, etc. have very good training courses on AWS.
AWS Essentials: EC2 Basics
If you have further questions, open a new StackOverflow question per question. You will seldom get answers to long multi-question questions.
i am newbie to use AWS system.
well, my freetier is just expired recently.
so far, i run an instance all day and use ssh to make code there.
but now, i realized it could charge me more than i expected. so i decided to terminate the instance.
then, how can i connect to instance easily? do i need to turn it on everytime i want to code?
And which is better? whether using DynamicDB(in AWS) or make a separated instance and install linux and mongodb(or something else).
Thanks =)
Best practices to save on cost is to stop (not terminate) your instance when you are not using it.
You will not pay for your instance in STOPped mode. You will just pay for the storage of your EBS volumes (boot drive).
When you Terminate your instance, you cannot restart it. If you Terminate you instance, be sure your data are saved on a secondary EBS volume or a snapshot or stored on S3.
Regarding your second question, it really depends on your application needs : at what scale do you expect to run ? How large will be your data store ? What type of query are you going to perform ?
For most cases, DynamoDB will be more cost effective than running a couple of EC2 instances with a Mongo DB cluster. And you will not need to maintain and to operate the infrastructure, AWS will do it for you.
You might have other point of view from this question : DynamoDB vs MongoDB NoSQL
Might be easier to just use MongoHQ: https://bridge.mongohq.com/signup
If you're interested in learning how to set up the servers, digitalocean is a good bet as they don't charge you for the IOPS and give you SSDs on the instance:
http://www.digitalocean.com
Enjoy!
Curious if this is possible:
We have a web application that at MOST times, works just fine with our single small instance. However, when we get multiple customers running simultaneously intense queries (we are a cloud scheduling service); our instance bogs way down to near 80% cpu load and becomes pretty unresponsive.
Is there a way to have AWS fire up another small instance (or a few), quickly, only for the times that its operating under this intense load? BUT, the real question is how does this work when we have very frequent programming updates to our application? Do we have to manually create a new image everytime we upload a code change???
Thanks
You should never be running anything important on a single EC2 instance. Instances can--and do--go offline randomly. Always use an autoscaling (AS) group that spans multiple availability zones. An AS group will automatically bring new instances online when you hit a certain trigger (in your case, CPU utilization). And then it will scale down the instances when traffic subsides. Autoscaling is the heart and soul of AWS and if you're not using it, you might as well be using a cheaper (and more durable) VPS host.
No, you don't want to be creating a new AMI for each code release. Ideally you should use a base AMI (like one of Amazon's official ones) and then have it auto-provision at boot. You can use the "user data" field when you launch an AMI to bootstrap this process. It can be as simple as a bash script that pulls from your Git repo to as something as sophisticated as Puppet or Chef.
The only time I create custom AMI's is if the provisioning process just takes too long. However that can almost always be solved by storing the needed files in S3.
I do have a free micro instance on AWS and quite often my CPU is throttled making it very hard to use.
I do want to know if there is any way to test a bigger instance so I see which one would be ok.
Side questions:
Can I go back to the free micro if I want?
Can I limit the cost of the testing, or do an estimate on it? I don't want to endup with a surprise bill as the result of the testing.
You can of course launch a new instance of a larger size, run your tests, then terminate the instance. It will not effect your running micro instance in any way at all.
AWS publishes their pricing data, so you can either calculate the cost manually or use the cost calculator: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
There is no way to "cap" your AWS spend.
Mike Ryan's answer is correct as such, but there might be a better way to achieve your goal, because it is possible to upgrade your Amazon EC2 t1.micro instance in place. This process (and the few constraints) are summarized in Eric Hammond's article Moving an EC2 Instance to a Larger (or Smaller) Instance Type:
When you discover that the entry level t1.micro instance size is
simply not cutting it for your growing application needs, you may want
to try upgrading it to a larger instance type, perhaps an m1.small or
even a c1.medium.
Instead of starting a new instance and having to configure it from
scratch, you may be able to simply resize the existing instance by
asking Amazon move it to better hardware for you. Of course, since
this is AWS, you don’t have to actually talk to anybody—just type a
few commands and the job is done automatically.
Eric describes how to achieve this via the command line, but the same can be done via the AWS Management Console as well if your prefer, the instance menu features a respective command Change Instance Type (only enabled when the instance is stopped).
Alternatively you might also want to get acquainted with the ease of duplicating an EBS-Backed EC2 instance by means of an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), which allows you to start any number of exact duplicates of your current instance - this process is outlined in Creating Amazon EBS-Backed AMIs Using the Console for example.