
Try Ubuntu 10.10 Server in Amazon EC2, entirely on our dime - yungchin
https://10.cloud.ubuntu.com/
======
johnnygood
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.

~~~
vimalg2
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)

~~~
nadim
150.9 here.

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

[http://3spoken.wordpress.com/2006/12/10/cpu-steal-time-
the-n...](http://3spoken.wordpress.com/2006/12/10/cpu-steal-time-the-new-
statistic/)

------
gvb
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.

~~~
Nervetattoo
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).

------
timf
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.

~~~
jrockway
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.

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

------
vimalg2
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.

------
listic
Do I only get to use it once?

~~~
theDoug
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.

~~~
listic
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.

------
3ds
Didn't work for me. At least not with ssh-key based auth, don't know what user
name to use. too bad.

~~~
vimalg2
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.

~~~
3ds
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...](http://blog.eike.se/2010/10/intalling-drupal-7-on-fresh-
ubuntu-1010.html)

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

~~~
Freak2love
Nice!

~~~
StavrosK
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!

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nivertech
wow - $0.085 for free!

they better give Ubuntu 10.10 public AMI ID.

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

~~~
cmsj
[http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/query/maverick/server/released....](http://uec-
images.ubuntu.com/query/maverick/server/released.txt) has the AMI IDs for all
the maverick server images, including the released ones.

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

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

