AWS free tier usage

Question

I am using AWS t2.medium instance which is a paid intance. Right now i have all the three servers in one instance :

SQL
Tomcat
Apache

And i am using 4 GB Ram instance. Now i want to use AWS free tier instances which has 1 GB Ram. I will have a separate free tier intance for each of my servers. I want to check whether my free tier instance would be capable of handling my Tomcat alone.

DATA for tomcat memory usage. :

VIRT = 3620m
RES = 507m
SHR = 11m
Mem = 12.8%

So which utilization should i be concerned. Is the real usage of tomcat is resident memory or since virtual utilization is more than 1 GB i would not be able to use tomcat in a free tier instance?

Answer 1

The AWS free usage tier for EC2 provides:

• 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux t2.micro instance usage (1 GiB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
• 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Microsoft Windows Server† t2.micro instance usage (1 GiB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month
• 750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing*
• 30 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage in any combination of General Purpose (SSD) or Magnetic, plus 2 million I/Os (with EBS Magnetic) and 1 GB of snapshot storage*

* These free tier offers are only available to new AWS customers, and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date. When your 12 month free usage term expires or if your application use exceeds the tiers, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates (see each service page for full pricing details).

Therefore, you can only run 1 x Linux and 1 x Windows server continuously for free, and only in your first 12 months of service.

Therefore, it will not be possible to "have a separate free tier instance for each of my servers".

As to what to run... it's a tradeoff between meeting the needs of your application and your users vs reducing costs.

Some cost-saving options:

• Auto Scaling can be used to scale-out your infrastructure when needed and scale-in when it is not needed.
• Spot pricing can be used to obtain instances up to 90% off, but with the risk that they will be removed if the spot price rises above your bid price.