Thursday, March 30, 2017

Getting started with AWS

Cloud is all rage now. I am going with the assumption that the readers are familiar with what Cloud is. If not here are some quick starters (1, 2) to know more about the same. Along with the blogs on Big Data, I will also blog on Cloud Computing. So, have fun.

Practice, practice, practice - there is no other alternate to become good at something. The first step is to create an account with AWS here.


I won't be going through the sequence of steps for creating an account as it's the same as creating an account with any other site. You can provide your credit or debit card and you will be billed based upon your usage. Nothing more, nothing less.

Usage of what? AWS has 10's of services like EC2 for creating an instance in the Cloud, EBS for creating a block based storage and so on. They had been adding new services and new features on a regular basis. An instance is a virtual server in the cloud, on which you can deploy apps, do some processing etc. Depending on the service that has been used you will be billed automatically. Nothing less or nothing more. More about the pricing here and here.

As mentioned above, an EC2 service is for a Linux or a Windows instance. There are different EC2 pricing models (on-demand, spot, reserved, spot), here is the pricing for the on-demand instances. For these types of instances there is no commitment and you can demand when ever you want to. The pricing is rounded hourly, so if you use an instance for 5 minutes, still you will be charged for an entire hour. Don't worry the charge is very less, depending on the size of the server.


The hourly price depends on the OS (linux is cheaper than windows), region where you want the instance (Mumbai, North Virginia etc), size of the server (t2.nano being the cheapest and p2.16xlarge being the costliest). There had been so much competition in the Cloud space, the vendors had been cutting down the prices on a regular basis.


While creating an instance in the Cloud, it's better to pick a smaller instance for the sake of learning so that we won't get a hefty bill at the end of month. For the sake of beginners, AWS gives a couple of freebies for the first one year once the account has been created. More details here. One of the freebie is 750 hours/month of t2.micro server (Windows and Linux) for 12 months. So, you can start an EC2 instance of t2.micro for one year and pay nothing for 1 year. If two instance are started then we can run it 6 months for free.

A thing of caution is to return the resource back to Amazon once you are done with it, this way AWS can allocate the resource to someone else and stop your billing. The billing starts for someone else.

Go ahead and create an account with AWS using the link here. And in the next blog, we will look into how to create an Linux instance in the Amazon Cloud and log into it. As time goes, we will look into some of the advanced features of the AWS Cloud.

1 comment:

  1. Good start, thanks for starting this,waiting for next article

    ReplyDelete