The Cost of Experimenting with the Cloud

So after two months of my part-time experimentation with the Simple Storage Service (S3) from Amazon Web Services (AWS) using Hayloft, my company finally got charged for its usage. Three cents. It will be interesting to see if it actually shows up on my company credit card bill, or if Amazon.com defers it until the amount gets a little larger.

It's going to take a while. Typically I run the automated test suite many times a day, and each execution issues dozens of transactions to S3, but each transaction involves a tiny amount of data. Still, considering all I've learned while working on this project, this is a bargain.

Update 2011-12-18

I just counted: 198 individual S3 operations in the Hayloft test suite as of today, each one involving at least one request and response with S3.