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An AWS spot instance helps to reduce the running cost of the EC2 instance.  The user bids for a spot instance request specifying the maximum price that the user is willing to pay per hour per instance. Once the spot instance request is fulfilled, the instance will continue to run until it is manually terminated or the spot price increases above the maximum bid price. The user is not charged as per the max price; instead the user will be charged at the current spot price in that availability zone. To know the charges for spot instances, Amazon EC2 provides access to a data feed, which details the user’s spot instance usage and pricing every hour.

The present guide demonstrates how to subscribe or delete the spot instances price data feed.

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A spot instance helps to reduce the cost of the instance.  To use spot instances, the user bids for a spot instance request specifying the maximum price that the user is willing to pay per hour per instance. If the maximum price of the bid is greater than the current spot price, the user’s request is fulfilled and the user’s instances run until terminated or the spot price increases above the maximum bid price. When the spot instance request is canceled, the spot instances that were launched previously through the canceled request do not automatically get terminated. The only time that the spot instance service terminates a running instance is when the spot price exceeds the max bid price. Note that though spot instances can use Amazon EBS-backed AMIs, the user cannot stop and start spot instances launched from an AMI with an Amazon EBS root device.

The present guide demonstrates how to view running spot instances and cancel the request.

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If you’re on the Amazon cloud, then you’ve probably already noticed that the AWS bill you receive is exceedingly complex. If you haven’t already switched, than perhaps stories from peers have scared you off. With the complexity of the consumption-based bill, your cloud costs can get out of hand and you may not understand why.

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Leaving an instance running when it isn’t needed isn’t especially cost effective. But is there a better solution when you need to run short jobs on a recurring schedule? A cloud scheduler allows you “talk” to your cloud and pre-define when instances will start-up and be shut down, from development through to production. Essentially, it enables you to pay only for the time you need.

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In the final installment of this 3-part series, we will discuss data retrieval, account permissions, integrating with S3, and transferring secure data. To recap, part 1 introduced Glacier as an extremely low-cost storage service that provides secure, durable, and flexible storage for your data backup and archival. In part 2, we discussed some functionalities of Glacier including managing archives, creating a vault, Glacier durability and archive inventory. And now, part 3.

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When you keep important business data in your EC2 servers, you need a backup and disaster recovery (DR) solution like you would for any server. For operational backup, the most efficient and effective approach in EC2 is to use EBS snapshots. These are the parallel of hardware snapshots in a traditional data center.In this post we will discuss the challenges you encounter when you use EBS snapshots.

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In part 1 of this three part series, we introduced Amazon Glacier as an extremely low-cost cloud storage service that provides secure, durable, and flexible storage for data backup and archival. Amazon Glacier allows you to store your data reliably for as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month. It helps you to retain your data for future analysis or reference so you can focus more on business than operating and maintaining storage infrastructure.

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AWS has introduced a new offering called Amazon Glacier, an advanced, durable archive that changes the traditional manual way of archiving.

AWS Glacier follows the similar concept and is ideally suited when you need to store your data files/objects, collected over years, in a reliable place. In this presentation you will find some basics on how to get started with Amazon glacier including some important tips and best practices.

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Elastic IP addresses are static IP addresses designed for Amazon cloud. An Elastic IP address belongs to the user’s AWS account and is not bound to a particular instance. The user can control the elastic IP address until the user explicitly releases it. However, unlike traditional static IP addresses, Elastic IP addresses help the user to achieve high availability as it allows to script the usage of an IP address and reallocate it in a glance to other instance in the same region when the instance or availability zone fails. An AWS account can have a maximum of 5 elastic IPs per region. If you like extend this limit you can apply for more Elastic IP address here.

This guide demonstrates how to allocate or release an Elastic IP for an AWS account.

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The Simple Notification Service is often overlooked when it comes to Managing Scale. It is actually one of the most useful services in the AWS backbone. This article will show you how you can leverage SNS to meet the demand on your Apps, as well as combining with CloudWatch.

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