Try Ubuntu 10.10 Server in Amazon EC2, entirely on our dime | Hacker News Reader

Try Ubuntu 10.10 Server in Amazon EC2, entirely on our dime

10.cloud.ubuntu.com

125 pointsyungchin29 comments

The beauty of this is that it's a way for them to let people try Ubuntu Server quickly and easily. While I don't remember the articles, we've all seen the ones talking about how demand isn't linear. Lots of people will try something free that won't try something that costs even a cent. So, Canonical will pick up the 2 cent tab (the cost of one hour of a Micro instance). Many will try it. Heck, if a million people try it, it will cost Canonical $20,000. That's a lot of exposure for a small amount of money. Companies are paying way more than 2 cents per click in advertising. Booting up an instance to try it out is a lot more engagement and investment in the process than an ad click.

Canonical is getting smart people to engage with their product for several minutes (if not the whole hour) for a mere 2 cents. That's one of the best campaigns I've seen and far more effective and cheaper than AdWords for what they're doing.

Micro instance will only make them disservice. It will freeze and scare potential new Ubuntu users.

No, not in my experience.

I agree, it's probably a good idea, but in order to make statements about effectiveness, you've got to show some numbers.

What I'm thinking is that while the conversion rate may be a lot better than with something like AdSense, how many people are going to find out about this promotion? (that aren't already ubuntu users)

I was provisioned a Small instance (with the 1.7GB ram). Did everyone else get a Micro?

Unixbench 5.1.2 gave me a score of 133.5 on the one I booted. Anyone know if this is pretty much par for the course on a EC2.small?

BTW, I've gotten excellent unixbench numbers (around the 500 mark) on one of lsc's smaller Xen instances(512M from prgmr.com)

150.9 here.

It is important to normalize those numbers by accounting for steal time.

http://3spoken.wordpress.com/2006/12/10/cpu-steal-time-the-n...

55 minutes... you better have a pretty good idea of what you want to try before the clock starts ticking.

The options are:

* Base Install

* Wordpress

* MoinMoin

The announcement "pre-configured applications to choose from (such as Wordpress and MoinMoin)" implied there were more options. Sorry, no.

Agreed. I signed up, installed ruby and sinatra for a quick test environment before i realized i had no clue what the public ip was, or maybe you need to configure something for aws.

The ip you are given to ssh in with seems to not be open on other ports, or maybe its a different ip for common web ports – i don't know.

So, plan well .. (or treat it simply as a cli test).

Wondering how they deal with abuse issues (or rather how AWS is OK with them doing this).

Usually to get an EC2 account, you give out an email and a credit card and also do an SMS message confirmation. Any abuse issues will be tracked to you (unless you figure out how to get around source packet provenance). And you're either at fault or your VM was infiltrated and you have a venue to explain yourself.

I realize that is not foolproof or anything but it is a higher bar than just needing an email confirmed and getting right down to it.

What are people going to do in 55 minutes, send spam and brute-force ssh servers? Yeah, this is already so prevalent that nobody cares anymore.

Cool: the web app itself is written in Django, and the source is available: https://code.launchpad.net/awstrial

Fun Things to do when the timer hits the low digits:

Start 'sudo rm -rf' ing twigs, branches, trunks of your filesystem.

I took a chance on /var before losing access to the instance. That was fun.

Do I only get to use it once?

I don't believe so, and if even so you're free to create another account.

This service looks to be just to get people into trying it out- the downloads are entirely free, too.

I'm learning Amazon Web Services and I have already used two hours in the process. I certainly see the need to use it for at least several more hours for learning. I will try Ubuntu this way, too - to see how it goes.

Creating another account, or ssh key, or whatever is certainly not worth the price and feeling unclean for cheating - even for me, unemployed student from the 3rd world. Because prices for instances start with 2 cents/hour. Good move for Canonical, anyway - 'free' is attractive, even if the usual price is 2 cents.

Yes. My hour just finished, and I get "Your instance has been terminated. Thank you for taking part in this offering."

Didn't work for me. At least not with ssh-key based auth, don't know what user name to use. too bad.

If you don't have a RSA key stored in your Ubuntu SSO account, they will provide a temporary password, that you have to change immediately after login.

I did have the key stored, told them about my problem, they said it was a bug and let me have another go. Took me almost one hour to get Drupal 7 beta running and I turned that into a blog post:

http://blog.eike.se/2010/10/intalling-drupal-7-on-fresh-ubun...

I already run Ubuntu server, so I'd rather not charge Canonical.

Nice!

I don't really know why I said that, just, you know, don't cost them money if you already know Ubuntu Server. Support Ubuntu by not using this!

wow - $0.085 for free!

they better give Ubuntu 10.10 public AMI ID.

http://alestic.com/ still doesn't list one.

http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/query/maverick/server/released.... has the AMI IDs for all the maverick server images, including the released ones.

But I do have to pay for launching instances with these IDs on my own, do I?

That's how EC2 works. Canonical didn't say they are just going to pay for all your servers now.

they did say "on our dime"

Alestic does list an AMI for 10.10 now.

http://alestic.com/2010/10/ec2-ubuntu-maverick

Reply on news.ycombinator.com