METABASE AWS Free tier (T2.micro)- Does it run ok?

Hello,

Is there anybody running metabase on AWS free tier (t2.micro) with reliable MySQL requests? I’m at the point where I need to decide if I will go from designing a full dashboard from scratch or use metabase but the running costs on a t2.small are 80 bucks per month.
So I have two questions:

  1. Does it work with a t2.micro instance?
  2. Can you ask Metabase to shut down when not used or to freeze? How do you reduce running speed?

Btw, Heroku seems free but seems to launch the metabase portal each time I go on the direct link.

Does it means that the Heroku server cannot run when I don’t access it? Pulses are thus not working?

Thanks

Matth

Ok,

for your info, I relaunched it with a t2.small as advised and will tell you if it works.
As for Heroku, I tried a hobby tier with a postgress hobby feature.

Seems to work ok, some communications failure though, we’ll see if the pulse do work.

Moreover, I already contacted AWS’ support and they are going to tell me what plan is the most relevant for running metabase at a smaller cost.

It seems that via cloudwatch it is possible to schedule up and down time for metabase instance: eg: let it run during the day only or when pulse are scheduled.

I will keep you posted.

Matth

Someone else on here reported problems running on AWS micro. You should be able to find it somewhere.

Thanks, I read it but it was a problem with running the instance which works perfectly fine.

My GoDaddy account doesn’t allow me to check the MySQL logs so I don’t understand the problem.

Anyway, I’m now on Heroku, it’s a bit more stable… but still too random for me.

I will try to find another MySQL DB hosting that is sturdy.

Thanks.

Matth

If you’re able, the solution to the cost problem can be more involved than just running an instance 24/7.
AWS offers tools like auto-scaling groups/clusters, that can scale down to 0 active instances when appropriate…

In other words, when there’s no traffic, there are no servers. This has one major implication however - a new server must be spawned on first request. That takes a few minutes.
Work arounds to this include:

  • if your traffic is predictable, schedule your instance to shut-down when not in use (i.e. night-time).
  • use auto-scaling with ‘spot instances’. Spot instances are instances you ‘bid’ on. Typically, the costs of these are at least 50% of on-demand instances, but they can be terminated on short notice, and only last 6 hours max
  • using auto-scaling with a minimum 1 micro instance. This means the cluster will still respond, albeit a bit slowly on the first few requests. Once a small instance has fired up (as part of your auto-scaling configuration), your elastic load balancer can direct traffic to the small instance.
  • purchase a reserved instance for 1-3 years. Cost savings here are also significant.

Deploying applications on AWS in a cost-effective manner usually entails some infrastructure administration and automation.

Note, you should DYOR here - I’m recalling this off the top of my head.

Yes, free Heroku tier requires regular access through the front end router to keep it “alive.”

Have you thought about running it on a VPS somewhere? You can easily get it going for $5 or less a month at a number of providers.

Not exactly what you asked, but Metabase runs very well in a docker container on Google Kube Engine paired with a mysql cloud SQL repository. But don’t know if you can get away with just the f1-micro instances for your Kube cluster, though i expect that it might. So there might be some cost involved. But as hagen mentions above, cost can be managed by not running 24/7.

Hey,

I just joined discourse to ask if anyone else was having problems with metabase on the default EB configuration. I’ve been using it for the past week and it is not running very well. Sometimes it takes 10 seconds to load the login screen or my questions, which is weird since I am not making any queries. However when I monitor the environment’s CPU and latency, everything seems normal, so I am not sure what is the real problem here.

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yes yes yes! that's the exact reason why i am here as i wanted to see if there are some other people with similar problems and if they have some solutions.