[tor-relays] Setting up AWS cloud-relay - don't reserve expensive storage!

[Runa A. Sandvik]

On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 1:49 AM, Nick Sheppard <nshep at attglobal.net> wrote:
> On 08/12/13 23:22, Runa A. Sandvik wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 10:26 PM, Nick Sheppard <nshep at attglobal.net>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 08/12/13 19:02, Nick wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Quoth Roger Dingledine:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Sun, Dec 08, 2013 at 04:00:06PM +0000, Nick Sheppard wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> At the end of the month I got a bill for 120 dollars. And Amazon
>>>>>> were quite right - they were charging me for the 1024 GB of storage
>>>>>> I had accidentally asked for by not changing the default when I set
>>>>>> up the instance.  The first 30 GB were free, the other 994 I was
>>>>>> paying for. And I was only actually using 1.5 GB ...
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> *Storage*? As in, disk space? Surely you mean bandwidth, but you
>>>>> seem quite clearly to mean disk space, so I'm confused.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Sounds to me like Amazon decided the instance should be given 1024GB
>>>> of disk space by default, regardless of the fact that it (obviously)
>>>> remained completely unused.
>>>>
>>>> Nick, if Amazon were a reasonable company that certainly ought to be
>>>> the sort of thing you could say "I didn't realise, it was
>>>> misleading, and I didn't use the offered space, please refund me".
>>>> However given their love of automation and robotic offerings I
>>>> suspect such pleas would be ignored.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Nice idea, but I don't think I'd have a case.  The 1024 GB is there on
>>> the
>>> setup screen (at least it is for eu-west-1), there were many ways I could
>>> have seen how much unused storage I had, I could have checked my bill
>>> more
>>> often, I could easily have set up an email alert for when the bill passed
>>> a
>>> set threshold ...
>>
>>
>> @AWSSupport replied to my tweet saying they have reached out to you
>> via the AWS Support Center at https://aws.amazon.com/support.
>>
>
> ... and not only did they reach out to me, they immediately gave me a full
> refund.  So a big thank-you to Runa for your very effective tweet! :) :) :)
> Perhaps this will persuade Roger Dingledine that the folks at AWS love
> kittens and rainbows as much as we do ...

Great, glad I could help!

> However (for there is a "however") I'm now even more puzzled by the default
> settings.  Mickey N at AWS replied that:
>
> "It's my understanding that when a Linux/RHEL instances are launched, the
> default amount of EBS storage in every region is set to 6GB. ... I've
> attached a screenshot of the Management Console page where the default 6GB
> is displayed."
>
> And the 6 is in exactly the same place where we see 4 (on us-east-1) and
> 1024 elsewhere.  I've pointed this out to AWS.  I have no idea what's
> happening here.

I have a support ticket open and have been talking to Mickey about
this. It seems all the instances, excluding us-east-1, were created
with storage space set to 1024 GB. This is interesting because I only
ever created one instance, us-east-1, and then used the AMI copy
function [1] to copy the instance to the other regions.

I will write an update when I hear back/when this issue has been resolved.

[1]: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/03/12/announcing-ami-copy-for-amazon-ec2/

-- 
Runa A. Sandvik