AWS spot instances for expirements and development

Question

On my computer (laptop) I need windows to use email, word, excel, etc, But sometimes, i need linux too for some projects i do at home.

Until now, I have been playing around with several solutions:

• Dual boot: works fine generally, but its really annoying when i need to jump over to the other OS for a sec
• VM: better, but rather slow often times

Also, both of these solutions lack when i have to move to a new computer, because i have to reconfigure everything again.

Recently I have been playing with the concept using of AWS spot instances as my experiment/home project machine.

Has anyone tried this? What problems have you faced? Is there a better solution i am not aware of?

Thanks in advance!

Other stuff that would help me out: Where did you store the home directory and other relevant data? EBS? EFS? How did you move working files to/from the instance (for instance for editing code)?

PS: If this is not the right place to ask, please correct me

Answer 1

The only problem: spot instance may be terminated anytime without prior notice. So for testing purposes I prefer on-demand instances.

If you need to test for a long time (e.g. you develop something during a week 8 hours a day) but still do not want to deploy a separate OS locally then you can deploy on-demand EC2 and stop it when it's not in use (16 hours a day in this example). You'll have to pay for used storage only but not for the instance.

Alternatively, you can deploy a new image each time and rsync/ftp data there from your desktop.

One more alternative: depend on your physical location sometimes you can get used desktops really cheap, so you may want to buy just another box for testing purposes.

Answer 2

Depending on the tests you are doing. Spot instances can work or not for your case because they can be terminated any time the price goes over your bidding price.

Try a Raspberry Pi

Answer 3

I know you've discounted virtualisation, but Virtual Machines would be an almost perfect solution here. I use VirtualBox running Ubuntu, inside that I run Eclipse and MySQL. Performance is absolutely fine on my old i7-2600K with 16GB RAM and an SSD. I allocate 3 cores and 6GB RAM to the VM.

When I move to a newer computer the environment will move with me. I actually set this up because I reinstall windows occasionally and I got tired of configuring my PHP development environment, as getting debugging working is tricky.

What are you doing in your Linux VM that virtualisation on a modern machine is too slow for? Something like video editing I might understand, but for experimentation just about anything should be ok.

However, using AWS to provide a Linux machine is fine. AWS Lightsail is probably all you'd need, it's much simpler than full AWS if you need a full month. Any VM provider would be fine - something like Linode (which I have no experience with) gives you more resources than AWS for the same money, but again it's monthly.

In AWS on demand instances will be more reliable than spot instances. However given the machines are EBS (ie network disk) backed your state will generally be kept if the spot instance is taken from you. You can also snapshot the VM to save state, or sync your data up to S3 quite easily.

To compare prices, a t2.micro is $0.012/hr and a t2.nano is $0.0059 in Virginia, and you can't buy spot. A modern m4.large is usually $.108/hr, or $0.03/hr spot, saving 75%. So you're probably best off with a t2 instance on-demand instance, unless you need more power. You can always stop your instance, change the size, and start it again.