Answers to questions we often field
Billing
How come my AWS bill contains charges for EC2 when I haven't used EC2 at all?
In most cases, the EC2 charge you are seeing is a result of the standard configuration we use in your VPC. The private subnets in your Cornell standard VPC are connected to the world (for outgoing traffic) by a NAT instance. That NAT instance is really a small EC2 instance, though it won't appear in your EC2 instance list in the AWS Console. You can see the NAT instance(s) configured for your account here: https://console.aws.amazon.com/vpc/home?region=us-east-1#NatGateways:sort=desc:createTime
The NAT instance gives EC2 instances in your private subnets access to the world for things like Linux repos, Windows update servers. We do have some AWS account owners that do not find the $1/day cost of the NAT to be worthwhile and turn it off. However, we caution about this because, with it off, your instances will not be able to do something as basic and critical as running "yum update" or "apt-get update" or get Windows updates.
Contact the Cloud Team if you'd rather not have the NAT deployed for that VPC.
See NAT Gateway pricing info here: https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/pricing/.
When will direct billing (though KFS) based on "Cost Center" tags be released?
This is still a work in progress and we expect to release this Cornell KFS feature in Spring 2017. In the meantime, you should strive to add "Cost Center" tags to your AWS resources as soon as possible. See Standard Tagging for details.
Until direct billing is turned on, you can use CloudCheckr or our billing API to sub-total the resource costs in your account (based on tag) and re-allocate those costs with the help of your unit Business Service Center.
Licensing
Does the Cornell Microsoft Agreement cover Microsoft software in AWS?
In most cases, no. See Microsoft Licensing within AWS.
Networking
I deleted my "default" AWS VPC. How do I get it back?
See I've deleted my default VPC. How do I get it back?
Will AWS designate an existing VPC as the "default" VPC?
Direct from AWS tech support, here's what they have to say about this (as of 2017-02-08):
...existing VPC's can not be assigned as the default and we can only create a new Default VPC for you.
Please note that when we create a default VPC, we do the following to set it up for you:
- Create a default subnet in each Availability Zone.
- Create an Internet gateway and connect it to your default VPC.
- Create a main route table for your default VPC with a rule that sends all traffic destined for the Internet to the Internet gateway.
- Create a default security group and associate it with your default VPC.
- Create a default network access control list (ACL) and associate it with your default VPC.
- Associate the default DHCP options set for your AWS account with your default VPC.
What is AWS Direct Connect and how does Cornell use it?
See AWS Direct Connect for Cornell.
What is the Cornell Standard VPC?
See The Cornell “Standard” AWS VPC.