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Well I was assigned a task to dissect all the possibilities for hosting SharePoint 2010 on Amazon EC2 and got to know few very interesting things which I thought should be shared with all those who are thinking of deploying there SharePoint 2010 on Amazon EC2 Cloud OR Just Use Amazon EC2 service for any other similar purpose. So Let Get Started…

Amazon EC2 is one of the services that are provided by Amazon under the banner of AWS (Amazon Web Services). This service gives you a server that’s very similar to your own in-house server but the only difference is that it’s hosted on Amazon’s cloud datacentre which you can access remotely. Now there are 2 main aspects while considering Amazon EC2 services for SharePoint 2010 i.e. The Cost and The Technology. I will try to cover both the aspects one by one.

The Cost

Amazon charges saying “Pay only for what you use” which mean that you would be charged only if you use their services, now I have few doubts about this which I will take later. So what Amazon says is that if you use their EC2 instance for an hour you pay only for that 1 hr. Go to Amazon’s website for more details on Pricing. For windows instance I have made a small table to be able to compare the pricing according to instance size and datacentre region. Rates AS ON 3^rd Sep 2010 (These rates may change; rather they do keep changing even for On-Demand Instance).

Adding to the basic cost of the instance you also pay for EBS Volume that you would be using with your instance +Internet Data Transfer for the minimum. If you are using Elastic IP then it adds more cost and so on for every service or feature you use from Amazon with your instance. So plan and go through pricing information very carefully before you use any of the Amazon’s web services. They say it’s a feature but it comes for a cost. The billing is complicated at first and will cost you if you are not careful.

Couple of things I would like clarify

1. Amazon has instance with only windows installed on it and also has few instance that have MS SQL Server, IBM InfoSphere, etc. pre-installed on the instance, which obviously cost more for the additional licensing cost of that software. For example Plain Windows Server 2008 Large Standard Instance cost $0.48 per hour and if you use Windows Server 2008 with MS SQL 2008 Pre-Installed the for same size of instance it will cost you around $1.08 per hour.

What I want to point out here is if your company already own license of these software then you must NOT use Amazon’s pre-installed images, rather you should use license that you own on plain windows instance which cost much less.

Now you must be thinking then can I use my windows server 2008 license also to reduce cost. The answer to this is yes and no.

Yes Amazon allows using your windows server 2008 licences on their instance BUT it is still a pilot program (Windows Server License Mobility Pilot for Amazon EC2). So it’s NOT for all yet.

2. When you are using any of the instance, be careful about restarting the instance every now then as Amazon charges you for full hour each time you transition instance from stop to start. So what it means is if you restart your instance 4 times in a single hour you would be rather billed for 4 hour instead of one (Ref).

3. Amazon provides usage reports for your reference in various formats and if you observer these reports on day-to-day basis you will notice that there might be some weird entries about things that you never performed or never used. Like what I experienced is I created a new instance with 50GB of EBS Volume and I used it for 4 hours and 1 restart, so total 5 hours of instance usage and then I stopped my instance so for next 4 day, so ideally for next 4 day I should be charged only for 50GB EBS volume usage, but when I observed usage report for those 4 day, I saw on entry that mentioned 250 GB EBS Volume Usage for 1 hour. Though it cost very less but yes it does mean that Amazon’s billing is not perfect, so you may also “pay for what you have not used”. I feel this should clarify the doubt that I mentioned in the beginning.

Well that’s it from my side for now; I know that there would be much more to what I have mentioned here, so I would definitely like to hear about your experiences as well.