Recipe: Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 on the AWS Free Tier

I love free stuff, who doesn't? In grad school, I once found a fancy cake in a shopping cart in the grocery store parking lot. I brought it to our graduate seminar to share with my fellow grad students, who enjoyed it until I mentioned where the cake came from.


I pretend to read the fine print, but in my excitement over free I usually fail to comprehend it. So it was for the AWS free tier announcement. I excitedly spun up an Official Ubuntu AMI and went on my merry way setting up apps, thinking all the time how wonderful it was to have my very own server on the interwebs humming away for gratis. At the end of the month, I got a bill for $0.50. Huh, not free, so I read the fine print (again):

10 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 1 million I/Os, 1 GB of snapshot storage, 10,000 snapshot Get Requests and 1,000 snapshot Put Requests*

Oops, the Official Unbuntu images have a 15GB root file system. 


Scott Moser provided a recipe for making an AWS Ubuntu 10.10 AMI with a 10GB root file system. So I made a public AMI based on his recipe that y'all can use: ami-8548bfec


UPDATE 12/30/10: Canonical released refreshed UEC images for 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) with 8GB root EBS volumes that will run on the AWS free tier. The list of Amazon published AMIs is available here.