I have been quite busy setting up a cluster for a SEM Business Intelligence Web Application (a LAMP app) on AWS but I wanted to highlight something I discovered today.

I have been a user of the unix ‘screen’ command since the Mono days and was showing it to developers here. As I ran it on our Ubuntu 9.04 based EC2 cluster (thank you Alestic for the Jaunty AMI), I discovered interesting profiles had been added to the distribution (had never seen it on my Debian based Linode machine).

Long story short, screen-profiles are pretty great (as described here and here) but, as it relates to EC2, they now have the ability to include the EC2 cost of the particular instance it’s being run on; as explained here and shown here:

I have always been struggling with the actual cost of EC2 (beyond running simulations on the calculator) for non transient web applications and that might help keep an eye on it.