running Ubuntu on an Amazon "micro" instance

Amazon announced today a new instance type. The "micro" instance type (t1.micro) has 613 MB of memory and can be used with AMIs of either x86 or x86_64. The cost for either is only $0.02 per hour.

That means that you can try out Ubuntu on EC2 for 2 measly cents. The official images of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) are perfect for this. If you're more adventurous and want to try out 10.10, please try out a daily build.

I think this smaller instance size really makes EC2 available to a lot more people. The minimum price for running an instance for a month goes from something like $70 (31 * 24 * 0.095) to less than $15. If you add to that the fact that you can shut down the instance and not be charged for unused CPU time, then start it back up when you need it, it can be really cheap. If you happen to need more CPU power, you can even shut it down, and start it back up with more resources!

So what are you waiting for!

$ MY_LAUNCHPAD_ID="smoser"
$ printf "#cloud-config\n%s\n" "ssh_import_id: [${MY_LAUNCHPAD_ID}]" > user-data.txt
$ ec2-run-instances --region us-east-1 --user-data-file=user-data.txt ami-1234de7b


A few things to note:

• Bug 634102 has to be worked around or you will not be able to reboot your instance. There are cloud-init debs available in my personal PPA with fixes. 10.10 won't have the issue, and I'll work on getting the fix backported to 10.04.  You can easily fix that by running:
  
arch=$(uname -m)
[ "$arch" = "x86_64" ] && ephd=/dev/sdb || ephd=/dev/sda2
sudo sed -i.dist "\,${ephd},s,^,#," /etc/fstab

  
• One interesting feature of this instance type is that it will run images that are x86 or x86_64 arch. Previously each instance type only ran a single arch.
• Above, I launched the instance with cloud-config syntax that will pull in my keys from launchpad rather than using public ssh keys stored in EC2. Thats why I didn't need to pass '--key <mykey>'

edits

• I fixed the ami id above, I had listed a instance-store image.  Also, a thing to note is that with t1.micro instances you *have* to use EBS images.
• I fixed the 'sed' command above, and fixed the price for m1.small (0.095, not 0.95)