Amazon AWS tricks as seen by noob

Every product has  a fine print today, just go to a local store and see. Amazon AWS is not an exception  and has some interesting, I would say, "features" that you should know about.

1) Each time you press Start or call start() from  API on instance you are IMMEDIATELY charged for the first hour. Hence if you make 10 star/stop during 20minutes you are charged for 10 hours.

Better example:

0:00 - start
0:10 - stop
0:20 - start
0:30 - stop
0:40 - start
0:50 - stop

Bill - 3  hours

2) You CAN run 64 bit image on Micro instance(t1.micro) but you CANNOT run it(64 bit image) on Small (m1.small) and Medium (c1.medium) instances. Do not expect  to upgrade 64bit Micro instance to small or medium, you can upgrade it only to Large and so on.



Well, these features are not game-changers but remember that it is better to keep instance running till the end of hour.

Bugs here

So again Network Manager got bugs, this time it is about high memory usage by nm-applet, obvious memory leak.
Again I wonder why NM is used in so many Linux distributions.  The only positive thing about NM is its integration with desktops but I would rather take working but bad styled software then highly integrated but very bad NM.   When my friends ask me "hey, what is nm-applet and why it takes 200Mb of RAM on my netbook?" I just tell them too install wicd instead of NM, also Ubuntu will still try to set NM back during upgrade to next version.

Amazon EC2 Endpoint URLs for HybridFox

hybridfox seems to have active development, at least you don't have to edit supported firefox version in install.rdf to get  it on Firefox 6+. Also people seem to use it more for Eucalyptus private cloud it can serve as 100% replacement for ElastiFox. With hybridfox everything looks the same but here is one big difference, it expects you to input  "Endpoint URL" (that is URL where Cloud API reside, it can be EC2_URL of Eucalyptus, for example).  I spent some time in search of these URLs for actual Amazon regions but found nothing better then just to steal the list from old ElastiFox


us-east-1  - https://us-east-1.ec2.amazonaws.com,
eu-west-1 - https://eu-west-1.ec2.amazonaws.com,
us-west-1 - https://ec2.us-west-1.amazonaws.com,
ap-southeast-1 - https://ec2.ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com,
ap-northeast-1 - https://ec2.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com



PS. If you already had Elastifox installed, you can try Hybridfox, It will take all your preferences and settings.