Amazon AWS - Very Reasonable People

I'm going to lax lyrical about the really great customer service I've had from Amazon AWS.  I tried the free usage tier last year, and thought I had shut it all off, indeed I the dashboard for the service at the time let me think it was all closed down - and hence accruing no costs.

However, I had missed an Elastic IP, it was going to nothing, but was still assigned.  So I got charged $2.48.  I was a little peeved at this, and had to recover the account password to log on and try to work out what was going on.  The new dashboard let me see the resource and release it.

But, I had already been charged, for effectively nothing.  So, I wrote up a quick note to customer services explaining this whole little episode.  It was such a tiny thing, I was willing to update my billing info (my card expired so they couldn't just take the cash)...

Blow me down though, they've replied and agree'd my usage was nothing and not worth billing and refunded me this tiny amount cancelling it all off.  And I'm so very very impressed I've come here to tell you all about this.

The reason being, I've been a customer to several server providers in time, and none have matched this level of speed and meaningful communication, and absolutely none of them have been as helpful nor agreeable.

So, kudos to Amazon.

AWS - First Impressions

So, I've been looking at Amazon Web Services, expect to see some tutorials up here soon covering the likes of setting up an instance, wiring it to an external IP and hosting a website on it, or trac, or SVN etc etc....

But, one thing has struck me about the AWS console, its not very user friendly.  I don't mean to demigrate the system, its a great innovation, and very interesting that I can turn off the PC I always keep hosting my code at home, but the things not mentioned, hard to find, or simply obscure in the way the system works is boggling.

A good example of a boggling way of working is that you can create your virtual instance, you can be instructed how to connect to it, you can be inside it and you can see it has an IP, that is a local address to the cluster of machines around it on the node its running on, not an address on the internet through which you can access it.  So, to assign an address which can be seen by the outside world, you have to use an "Elastic IP".  This is all documented, but its obscure, you add the Elastic IP in a completely different place to your virtual machine, its on a different page, and then you have to associate it with the running VM.... This is clearly so as if you have more than one machine in the cloud you can address them separately, or even stop external access to the machine, but when you've selected the VM wizard to help you put it together, and the solution you've picked is the web server, to now have this Elasstic IP automatically created and assigned is... well its weird.

I'll leave this here, and go get on with some work...