[lug] AWS Installfest-in-the-Cloud

[jeffrey.haemer at gmail.com]

Davide,

Yes, AWS is a paid service.

However, AWS is trying to gain market share, so at the beginning of
November, they introduced a new, cell-service-provider-like pricing
scheme<http://aws.amazon.com/free/>to gain market share: if you're a
new customer, they'll give you enough free
minutes to run a micro instance, 24/7, for an entire year.

(As the drug dealers all say in crime novels, "The first one's free, kid.")

That pricing scheme was what persuaded me to set up the event.

Plus, it's utility-pricing -- you pay for what you use -- so you could,
instead, run a cluster of 3 for eight hours a day. Or a cluster of 6 for
four hours a day. And so on.

If, like me, you already have an account, there's no free plan. It cost me
about $7 to go through all the exercises in Jeff Barr's book. :-(

Even if you're a new user, you have to give Amazon a way to bill you. That's
in case you spin up a cluster of a hundred, dual-teraflop-GPU instances and
then use them to process and store a few petabytes of NCAR data, just to try
it out. :-)

Unlike their web store, Amazon doesn't ask you for confirmation before you
use AWS resources.

Normally, any charges go onto your Amazon account, which means you have to
have one.  For a while, they were charging $0.03 each month to my MasterCard
for some stored data I was too lazy to delete.

I was describing this to someone who said, "I won't ever do business with
Amazon because they wouldn't host WikiLeaks."

Oh well.

They require a credit card even you never go over your free minutes, and I
don't know any way to get even free AWS service for someone who won't do
business with Amazon.

On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 2:11 PM, Davide Del Vento <
davide.del.vento at gmail.com> wrote:

> > get whatever help you need to set up a free, Amazon Web Services account
>
> Free? Isn't AWS a paid service?
>
> Thanks,
> ;Dav
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-- 
Jeffrey Haemer <jeffrey.haemer at gmail.com>
720-837-8908 [cell], http://seejeffrun.blogspot.com [blog],
http://www.youtube.com/user/goyishekop [vlog]
פרייהייט? דאס איז יאַנג דינען וואָרט.
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