About a year ago, during a time when I was barely aware about Cloud Computing or Amazon Web Services, I got assigned, along with a couple of colleagues from this consulting company I was working for, to bring an existing codebase from “alpha” to “production” and then ensure its smooth deployment to Amazon Cloud.
The customer wanted to go “live” in less than 3 months; they also wanted to be able to handle tens of thousands of visitors that would obviously click on banners and make them money. What it’s actually more probable is that they were hoping for a good exit, that is passing the hot potato to somebody else while walking out with a proft. On a side note, there is a term that could be used for these people, but this is not a meme-text so I won’t go more on that route.
Starting on a new project
With this project, things initially went to some direction: we had to incrementally deal with quite a few functionality issues and in the end we were able to put fixes for more than 100 bugs and glitches. Actually, this was all that we could do, along with the long hours required to get things done.
We could not be bothered by any setup issues with the “Cloud” configuration: we knew near to nothing on the topic and the customer fiercely guarded the “keys to the kingdom”; they would only agree on instance and resource set-ups on a case-by-case basis anyway. They were probably thinking they were paying way too much for those pesky Eastern European contractors (us), so I kind of get the “why” on keeping a close eye over the Amazon bill. It was fine by us; at the end of the day it was their home, with their needs and their rules.
The quick answer is “it cannot be precisely determined”; AWS charges by the hour and keeping a server up the whole month incurs a lot of variable costs.
Nevertheless, for some usual LAMP installation with a single domain hosted by Amazon through Route 53, the lowest monthly cost one can get (using on-demand) is:
Fixed Part:
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EC2 cost (t2.nano): $5 (approx)
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EBS cost (8Gb default storage): $1 (approx)
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Route 53 (1 domain): $0.5
Total: $6.5
Variable Part:
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Route 53 queries: usually no more than a few cents, depending on the number of visits the site receives and the TTL values.
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EC2 traffic: there are some free allowances, most likely less than $1
As I mentioned in the first text of the certification series, I went further upstream and got myself the second level of what LPI has on offer – LPIC-2 (verify). Was it easy? Was it hard? Let’s start.
Introduction
The LPIC-2 certification is granted by passing 2 exams, but only if one already holds a LPIC-1 certification. This means that in order to get LPIC-2 certified, one must pass a total of 4 exams.
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Exam 201 – with a focus on advanced system administration topics such as kernel and boot loader configuration, filesystems and troubleshooting.
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Exam 202 – focusing on a couple of common services such as e-mail, http, proxies and file sharing.
As with LPIC-1, the exams can be passed in any order, certification being granted when passing both.
Logistics
I have passed both exams with a Pearson VUE test center (actually 2 of them, as I have gone to 2 different locations for the exams). In this setup each exam normally costs around EUR 150; the second was paid by my current employer.
Preparation
What I have mentioned, preparation-wise, in the first text is still valid. Books alone will not help pass such exam, neither a light hands-on experience. The questions themselves are by no means tricky – if one actually used that particular piece of software or went through that usage scenario, then the answer comes fast; otherwise it won’t and the coin toss won’t help either. What I have also noted is that some questions are (randomly) asked at both 1st and the 2nd level; it’s very likely that the border between “harder” 1st level topics and “easier” 2nd level ones is very shallow.