This is mostly a note to self. When I need an EC2 instance to run a quick test, it may be overly annoying to provision one through the web console, or it may feel a bit overkill to do that using large frameworks like terraform. Using the AWS command line is just fine, if you know what command to run with which parameters, and it pays off quickly if, to run your tests, you use the settings often (AMI, subnet, security groups…) or if during the same test session you need to scrap and rebuild test instances a few times. Here is an example on how to do so with the AWS command line client.
ec2
TIL: availability zone names don’t matter
Say you have access to two separate AWS accounts, and say you have EC2 instances running in a certain region and availability zone, e.g eu-west-1a, in both accounts. Today I learned to my greatest surprise that, despite the same name, they may actually be two totally different locations. Intrigued? Read on!
How cheap is cheap?
Last month I wrote a new post, namely: Building a simple, resilient, cheap network service with AWS. Now that AWS’ billing cycle for November is complete we can ask ourselves how cheap was that “cheap” in the article, and give an answer. The cost is not exact to the cent, due to the presence of a a stopped instance I am keeping around, but will still be good enough.
To summarise, the article described how to set up a service on spot instances, thus saving on the EC2 cost. We want to understand if we really saved money, and if there are opportunities to save even more. If you haven’t read the previous post, it’s probably a good time to do it now. If you did, let’s go and check the bill.
Building a simple, resilient, cheap network service with AWS
In this post I’ll describe how I put together a number of pieces of information about AWS features to experiment with an idea. It’s nothing advanced, rather: it’s what happens when you are studying on something and you start seeing the possibilities. Don’t expect rocket science then, it’s more like a handful of notes I made in the hope they may be useful to more people than just myself.
Being an experiment where I was supposed to learn how to do things, it’s a manual set-up. Automation will follow, and in my case , it will be Terraform, but not in this post.
A sysadmin's logbook 