AWS EC2 is a service that provides secure compute capacity in the cloud. It is a viable option for secure, cost-effective computing provided through AWS. It can be used for things like research projects, web application hosting and administrative Business Intelligence/analytics. 

Features/Use Cases:

• Workloads which can be started on demand and powered off when not in use to reduce cost.
• Ability to set a budget in advance to prevent cost overruns. Ability to terminate server at any time.
• Departments who wish to migrate a server to a public cloud.
• Short term use cases where resources are needed for a limited amount of time.

You can see the introduction video for this service below:

Backups

DIT's AWS Compute services currently supports OS server backups (Snapshots) twice a day for 14 days. File level backups are not automatically included with servers provisioned through the AWS Compute service. Data protection is the responsibility of the server owner. Division of IT file level backup services may be requested by the server owner here at the Data Backup entry on the Service Catalog

Patching and Maintenance

DIT's AWS Compute services support includes OS patching.  Patch deployments will be announced 15 days in advance to server owners. Critical patches will be pushed out on a more aggressive timeline.  Server reboot post patch deployment is the responsibility of the server owner.

DIT is not responsible for errors that arise as a result of dependencies or incompatibilities between patches and client installed software.

Patches will be pushed by DIT to the production environment. Once pushed to production, there will be no rollback to previous versions.

When a new OS version is available for deployment on DIT's AWS Compute services an email will be sent out to all existing server owners to determine/decide if they want to request a Server OS Upgrade. Server OS Upgrades are to be treated as a new request that should be submitted via a the AWS Compute Request form.  Any existing data would need to be migrated or reinstalled by the owner on the new server.

Costs are calculated based on the following:

• Configuration selected
• Amount of time running during the billing cycle
• Data transfer costs

The cost of data transfer is variable and is based on the amount of traffic that occurs monthly.

AWS charges will be billed monthly to the college or department billing account provided through the university eRequest process.

Account owners can view their charges in near real-time and access their historical billing information through the DIT /hosting dashboard.