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

[Nick Sheppard]

On 09/12/13 02:28, Runa A. Sandvik wrote:
> 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/
>
Hi Runa (and AWS users),

Did we ever get to the bottom of the default storage/AMI copying issue? 
  I'd like to have another go at setting up a Tor relay on AWS eu-west-1.

Many thanks again for your help back in December.

Nick Sheppard