Is it possible to do a temporary upgrade of an AWS micro instance to test what would be ok?

Question

I do have a free micro instance on AWS and quite often my CPU is throttled making it very hard to use.

I do want to know if there is any way to test a bigger instance so I see which one would be ok.

Side questions:

• Can I go back to the free micro if I want?
• Can I limit the cost of the testing, or do an estimate on it? I don't want to endup with a surprise bill as the result of the testing.

Answer 1

Mike Ryan's answer is correct as such, but there might be a better way to achieve your goal, because it is possible to upgrade your Amazon EC2 t1.micro instance in place. This process (and the few constraints) are summarized in Eric Hammond's article Moving an EC2 Instance to a Larger (or Smaller) Instance Type:

When you discover that the entry level t1.micro instance size is simply not cutting it for your growing application needs, you may want to try upgrading it to a larger instance type, perhaps an m1.small or even a c1.medium.

Instead of starting a new instance and having to configure it from scratch, you may be able to simply resize the existing instance by asking Amazon move it to better hardware for you. Of course, since this is AWS, you don’t have to actually talk to anybody—just type a few commands and the job is done automatically.

Eric describes how to achieve this via the command line, but the same can be done via the AWS Management Console as well if your prefer, the instance menu features a respective command Change Instance Type (only enabled when the instance is stopped).

Alternatively you might also want to get acquainted with the ease of duplicating an EBS-Backed EC2 instance by means of an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), which allows you to start any number of exact duplicates of your current instance - this process is outlined in Creating Amazon EBS-Backed AMIs Using the Console for example.

Answer 2

You can of course launch a new instance of a larger size, run your tests, then terminate the instance. It will not effect your running micro instance in any way at all.

AWS publishes their pricing data, so you can either calculate the cost manually or use the cost calculator: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

There is no way to "cap" your AWS spend.