AWS Free Tier – Windows Server R2 & MySQL server - R&D Solutions

AWS Free Tier – Windows Server R2 & MySQL server

Free tier general information

The greatest feature in IT infrastructure is the so called Cloud. The revolutionizer in Cloud technology are Amazon.
Amazon provides an option to test their infrastructure, services and all cloud features that they provide for free.
And yes they have an explanation what exactly “Free Tier” means. This can be found on their official web site in section AWS free Tier Details.
As we know we can use EC2 instance with t2.micro for 750 hours in a Free Tier account. The table below illustrates the instance parameters.

Unfortunately we found some problems when we tried this “Free Tier”, sometimes it is not free tier at all.

 

“Free” Tier bill

We should build infrastructure from one Windows Server 2012 R2 and MySQL Server. Lets’go and run the EC2 instances.
We have 3 different options to choose from when we search for an AMI with our requirements:

  • MIcrosoft Windows Server 2012 R2 with SQL Server Express
  • MIcrosoft Windows Server 2012 R2 with SQL Server Web
  • MIcrosoft Windows Server 2012 R2 with SQL Server Standard

We know that the first option should be enough for our situation. We select Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 with SQL Server Express which is “Free tier eligible”. As we already know the only instance type which is part of free tier is t2.micro(Variable ECUs, 1 vCPUs, 2.5 GHz, Intel Xeon Family, 1 GiB memory, EBS only). For our protection, we can prevent ourselves from deleting the instance by mistake when we enable termination protection. Keep in mind that when we enable it we should “allow” after that termination. When we go to the section where we add additional storage, we can see a message that states that we’re eligible to use 30GB of EBS General Purpose or Magnetic storage.

You can see it on following screenshot:

This is not a problem for us because it will be enough for our application. Management Studio, Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server can all fit comfortably in 30GB. Amazon however want this kind of setup to be run from a 50GB instance. When we tried to run the instance with 30GiB we received error message stating that the size is too small and our instance launching has been terminated.

After that we tried to run Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 and on top of it to install MySQL. Everything was great with our environment except payment – we have been charged for a machine with Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 with SQL Server Web. This is not part of Free Tier as you can see from the screenshot made in the Billing dashboard:

 

The right way to fit in AWS Free Tier account

When we checked in AWS documentation we didn’t find anything about this kind of problem. I gave my colleague an advice to use his Free Tier account with Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Base (free eligible) and RDS instance with MySQL. In this situation he can absolutely use the free servers which are necessary for this setup.
With the suggested configuration we can use Microsoft Windows Server 2012 and RDS with MySQL server for free.
Just look at screenshot below:

As you can see, there are some tricky parts when using a Free Tier account in AWS. Keep in mind what is allowed and frequently check your accounts! A CloudWatch Alarm for your budget is a nice idea, so you can monitor your spending (if any) when you use AWS services.

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