Virtual Machines in the Cloud

I forgot to cover the cloud yesterday and it's probably going to take a post of its own anyway.

AWS - http://aws.amazon.com/console/

You 1st need an account in the cloud. I already had a Glacier account, so Amazon's Web Services was my 1st choice. Then I needed a Virtual Machine.

Turnkey Hub - https://hub.turnkeylinux.org/

They work on Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) using Virtual Servers in the Cloud (EC2), so that was easy to setup and they have a Small S3-backed server for $0.072/hour. The system's core that was identified as core-11.3-lucid-x86 the last time I ran it, but today, the Base distribution appears to be Debian 7.2 (Wheezy).  Let's see what happens when I Launch a new server. I have to choose a TurnKey Appliance with names like App-Engine GO, Bugzilla, Jenkins, Wordpress, etc. Maybe the one called "Core" will just give me a Linux prompt. I have to give it a Hostname, and it looks like I might have used daruffer.tklapp.com before (Hub's free Dynamic DNS domain).  I gave it a password and a Root file system size of 10 GB. However, it looks like my account has not been Enabled for TurnKey Linux on Amazon EC2 and they want a minimum of $10/month for Pay-per-use.  Yuck!

In fine print, I see: Free evaluation: Without a plan you can run one concurrent Micro server at no extra cost. Amazon's free usage tier may apply.  More fine print says: Free for the first year

New Amazon cloud accounts get 750 monthly micro server hours free for up to a year with Amazon's free usage tier. Usual usage fees: Unreserved Micro instances: $0.02/hour or about $14/month for continuous 24x7 usage. Reserved Micro instances: reserving a Micro instance through the Hub can save up to 56% of total costs and bring down the hourly usage fee to half a cent ($0.005) an hour.

That's probably what I used back in 29Apr11 when I 1st signed up, but I don't see any email to indicate when this $10/month thing happened.

Elastic Beanstalk - https://console.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/

Then again, Amazon itself appears to have something similar running 64bit Amazon Linux 2014.03 v1.0.1 running Docker 1.0.0. It took quite a while (2014-09-14 13:51:44 UTC-0700 to 2014-09-14 14:01:15 UTC-0700) to start up, but then I could access http://default-environment-6dhevgsdik.elasticbeanstalk.com/, which mostly just has links to tutorials (YouTube), sample apps (GitHub) and documentation (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/Welcome.html).

I've got some reading to do before I can do much more, so I just Terminated the Environment.

Jolicloud - http://www.jolicloud.com/jolios

I thought this was more along the idea that I am looking for, a  Ubuntu-based Linux distribution in the cloud, but they decided to take Joli OS Open Source and discontinue the service last year. It looks like this has become a pattern with Browser Based Operating Systems. Yet, there still are 7 classic versions of Windows and Mac OS you can run in a browser and some of these 9 Cloud Operating System You Can Try Out For Free or 11 Cloud OS (Operating Systems) you might want to give a try are still working.

All of these cloud solutions have the same problems:

1. How to make it less expensive than a dedicated PC?
2. How to save and manage your data and configuration.

The infant mortality and for-pay options are ample evidence that these issues have not been solved yet. I'm sure there are a lot of really smart people trying to figure this out, and eventually, we will see viable options that manage to survive. However, I don't think we are quite there yet. ;(