Micro instance (t1.micro) type is one of the most
fashionable and highly acceptable instance types by IT fellows supported by
Amazon EC2. During November 2010, AWS announced the free tier and started
offering 750 hours of Micro Instance usage free per month for the first one
year, but it's available as an Amazon EBS-backed instance only. You can now launch EC2
micro instances within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). AWS now extends to t1.micro instances
running inside of a VPC also.
Talking to it technical specifications, the Micro Instance
type doesn’t have that much power required for heavy stimulating. The main
memory presented in Micro instance type is 613MB. It comes with explode CPU
capacity that can be goes up to 2 Elastic Compute Units (ECU). That means the
CPU performance is not conventional. This is just not enough for running any severe
workloads. And yes, storage can be added through Elastic Block Storage (EBS)
and the free tier covers up to 30GB of storage space.
But from the technical specification it doesn’t mean Micro
Instances are totally ineffective. They offer excellent worth in certain cases.
In this article, I want to share how to get the best out of the Amazon EC2
Micro Instances.
Optimize Swap Memory –
This is pertinent to Linux based Micro Instances. By default, these types of instances
do not have swap space configured at initial level. I ran my Cloud Magic World Website on a Micro
Instance for a few days. During the crest loads, I have experienced Apache
Server or MySQL crashing unexpectedly. So with just 613 MB at your clearance,
you got to make sure that you have set aside enough disk space for the swap.
This will radically enlarge the reliability of Micro Instance.
Auto Scaling Out –
The funda on the Cloud is auto scaling out. Running a convoy of low-end servers
in parallel is more competent and cost effectual on any virtualized
infrastructure. As per the load and use-case, splitting a job across number of
Micro Instances may be cheaper and faster than running the same job on a single
Large Instance. This scale out structural design provides better fail over and quicker
processing.
Mull over Caching –
If you are scheduling to host sites on these Micro Instances, be clear in your
mind that they are not very dynamic. Dynamic websites demand more CPU power and
memory due to the approach each request is processed. Straightforward websites
like blogs and marketing
sites with a few dynamic contents are ideal participants for the Micro
Instances. Moreover, consider caching the content to avoid CPU spikes. For
example, if you are running any blog or website, you can enable caching plug-ins
to increase the performance. There are plenty of plug-ins available for caching
by free of cost.
Select 64-bit –
Always pick 64-bit when running Micro Instances. This is assured to give you
better recital than the 32-bit complement. You will see the difference when you
are running batch processing that deals with large files and processes.
Pull the Cron jobs –
Many patrons operate a Linux Micro Instance to run cron jobs and precise locale
tasks that monitor and handle their entire AWS infrastructure. If you want to
run a cron job, stop all other running services, add swap space to instance and
pull it to make it a tilt and mean cron job machine.
Summary:
Hope this article gave you the basic fundamentals to get best
out of the Micro Instances. I have mentioned core advantages and use cases of
EC2 micro instance type over here. From Best-of-breed, you can use micro
instances for normal dynamic websites and contents with caching power and
scaling advantage.
