Ubuntu EC2 Test Plan

EC2 is the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, providing scalable virtual private servers using Xen. Canonical provides Ubuntu AMIs (Amazon Machine Images). The aim of these test plan is to provide a comprehensive testing guide of the Ubuntu official images.

Payment

Amazon has a per use billing system for their cloud, this offers some challenges since there's no simple way for us to just pay for EC2 usage and dole it out to testers. Here are some ways we could deal with this:

• User pays, Canonical Reimburses
  • The user just uses EC2, tests our images, and then asks Canonical for a reimbursement, like an expense.
  • Pros:
    • No credit card or account management needed on our end, if we want to cancel a tester we just tell them we won't pay for any more time and not reimburse.
    • User has motivation to ensure they don't leave instances running all night if they have to pay up front.
  • Cons:
    • Admin overhead for HR
    • User has to pay out of pocket upfront, could make people wary of signing up/helping.
• One Canonical account shared by all testers (This idea is the worse one I think)
  • We make one ec2 account with a common login/password connected to the Canonical credit card.
  • Pros:
    • Easy to set up, no overhead for users.
  • Cons:
    • Anyone can just shutdown and create each other's instances.
    • No way to track who is doing what, so if one user spawns 50 instances and leaves them running we have no idea who is responsible.
    • Obvious security problem with the account credentials and CC.
• Seperate Canonical-created accounts for each tester billed to Canonical.
  • Pros:
    • Low user barrier to entry.
    • Some semblance of user access control.
  • Cons:
    • Won't scale if we have to manage all these accounts.
    • User can change the password if they want so we can't really shut someone off if they are determined.
• Ideas pursued but not possible:

  • Amazon gift cards sent to testers, can't use them for EC2.

  • Amazon DevPay, would work if we were "reselling" services to customers, no method to prevent testers from getting charged.

  • Asked amazon via a webform for help (Pending)
  • Phone support not available without signing up for Silver/Gold tech support.
• Random things about EC2 that you should know:
  • Charges credit card at the end of the month, however you can monitor billing (about a 24 hour delay)
  • When experimenting with accounts and what charges what the lag between doing stuff and it showing up on the account activity is enough to make trying new methods a long process.

If you had never run an Ubuntu EC2 image, you should look to our starters' guide

Reporting bugs

Testers for the EC2 testing project should be members of the Launchpad team Ubuntu AMI Testers.

Bugs will be reported in the Ubuntu AMI Testing project. The Server team will be responsible afterwards of reassigning the bugs to the correct project or Ubuntu package.

Test Results

The wiki will be used to record results