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Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?

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Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?

#41

Post by adrianN »

eropple wrote: post #39
013a wrote: post #35

Heroku's free tier is good. GCP App Engine is pretty similar, a little more powerful, but also more limiting in how you build your app. My pick for MVPs is AWS Lambda. It's very easy to get up and running, and you get access to the rich AWS ecosystem. Yeah yeah, the "unlimited scale" benefit will be great when you're accelerating user growth, but that's not why its a good pick for MVPs. Need a cron? Not too bad on Ap…

The difficult part with AWS is local development. Waiting on AWS deploys is not a fast process and it kills momentum. LocalStack tries, but IMO it's not great.

Deploying to lambda is literally uploading a zip.

Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?

#42

Post by eropple »

envolt wrote: post #22

I don't think Best (or Good) will be Free, after a certain tier (e.g AWS only gives a t2.micro for a month (750 hours to be specific)) Most of the cloud providers have some kind of startup program, where they offer free credits to startup. We (my company) got credit benefit from IBM, it's been a real savior for us. You can check it out here https://developer.ibm.com/startups/

Having some uncomfortably close experience with IBM Cloud very recently, I would have a hard time recommending it for just about anything.

I'd go to Azure over IBM Cloud, and I have perturbed many electrons about how frustrating Azure has been.

Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?

#43

Post by rdegges »

013a wrote: post #35

Heroku's free tier is good. GCP App Engine is pretty similar, a little more powerful, but also more limiting in how you build your app. My pick for MVPs is AWS Lambda. It's very easy to get up and running, and you get access to the rich AWS ecosystem. Yeah yeah, the "unlimited scale" benefit will be great when you're accelerating user growth, but that's not why its a good pick for MVPs. Need a cron? Not too bad on Ap…

Heroku has a nice cron addon you should investigate. It costs nothing (except it spins up a dyno to run your cron task so you will pay the prorated dyno rate). Very simple.

Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?

#44

Post by jm547ster »

eropple wrote: post #39
013a wrote: post #35

Heroku's free tier is good. GCP App Engine is pretty similar, a little more powerful, but also more limiting in how you build your app. My pick for MVPs is AWS Lambda. It's very easy to get up and running, and you get access to the rich AWS ecosystem. Yeah yeah, the "unlimited scale" benefit will be great when you're accelerating user growth, but that's not why its a good pick for MVPs. Need a cron? Not too bad on Ap…

The difficult part with AWS is local development. Waiting on AWS deploys is not a fast process and it kills momentum. LocalStack tries, but IMO it's not great.

Serverless framework offline plugin makes this fairy easy if you are going fully down the lambda route

Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?

#45

Post by ElFitz »

eropple wrote: post #39
013a wrote: post #35

Heroku's free tier is good. GCP App Engine is pretty similar, a little more powerful, but also more limiting in how you build your app. My pick for MVPs is AWS Lambda. It's very easy to get up and running, and you get access to the rich AWS ecosystem. Yeah yeah, the "unlimited scale" benefit will be great when you're accelerating user growth, but that's not why its a good pick for MVPs. Need a cron? Not too bad on Ap…

The difficult part with AWS is local development. Waiting on AWS deploys is not a fast process and it kills momentum. LocalStack tries, but IMO it's not great.

Cleanly separate your logic from AWS dependencies using interfaces / protocols, summarily mock the required service by implementing said protocols (sparing you the pain of mocking the AWS services themselves), and voilà, you're running everything locally.

It's easy. But if that's too much for you, the serverless framework has some nice plugins for all of it.

Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?

#47

Post by eropple »

adrianN wrote: post #41
eropple wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difficult part with AWS is local development. Waiting on AWS deploys is not a fast process and it kills momentum. LocalStack tries, but IMO it's not great.

Deploying to lambda is literally uploading a zip.

Yes. Do you know what deploying in my local environment, for my own projects, is? It's "control-S". (Because a file watcher reloads the application.)

This is acutely top-of-mind for me because I used to run a devops consultancy and I currently head devops, including release management, for a startup built heavily on AWS Lambda. I am doing my level best to reduce the loop as much as I can for the dev team.

It's still way, way slower than control-S. And always will be.

Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?

#48

Post by bbggrr »

cmsimike wrote: post #26
yingw787 wrote: post #5

Linode is $5/mo. and I got a $50 credit for just being at a software conference; I also don't think that expires (which is good because I'm not planning on using that credit atm). That's 10 months of free service. It's also pretty barebones in terms of upsold services, but apparently the customer support is pretty top-notch. I'd take a look at it.

All my credits seemed to expire after two months.

Linode's credits don't expire once they're applied to an account. Promo codes themselves can expire, though, so you'll miss certain promotions if you don't sign up in time. Open up a Support ticket if you think credits haven't been applied or disappeared without being used up by services. (Linode employee here.)

Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?

#49

Post by eropple »

ElFitz wrote: post #45
eropple wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difficult part with AWS is local development. Waiting on AWS deploys is not a fast process and it kills momentum. LocalStack tries, but IMO it's not great.

Cleanly separate your logic from AWS dependencies using interfaces / protocols, summarily mock the required service by implementing said protocols (sparing you the pain of mocking the AWS services themselves), and voilà, you're running everything locally. It's easy. But if that's too much for you, the serverless framework has some nice plugins for all of it.

I understand what one can do to create a leaky abstraction for local development. And it is leaky, and it can't be relied upon for correctness, and so while it makes "getting things done" possible, it makes getting things done correctly much more difficult than it needs to be.

And local development when you've opted to use systems like Cognito are well beyond its scope, unless someone has something very clever that I haven't seen.

From a lot of experience doing this on AWS and on other clouds, I have learned that it is better to use systems that you can operate, and then use hosted versions where applicable. RDS is great, but it's great mostly because you can run PostgreSQL locally and inspect its brain. DynamoDB, SQS, etc. tend to be untrustworthy and should be avoided unless you have a bulletproof story for local testing (and none of the fake implementations are bulletproof).

Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?

#50

Post by jedberg »

tjoff wrote: post #31
jedberg wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ok if you're ok with your service being down for days at a time. On vacation and the server breaks? Gotta wait till you get home. Internet down? Mine gigabit was just down for five days, a squirrel ate through the fiber and they had to a pull a new one. Running a server at home is fraught with peril but if those downtimes are ok, then go for it.

Still more reliable and orders of magnitude more powerful than any free service. You can also buy two.

> Still more reliable and orders of magnitude more powerful than any free service.

I don't think so. AWS Lambda has a generous free tier and runs on infrastructure that has constant monitoring by professionals, spread across thousands of machines in multiple datacenters all over the world, with an SLA.

Your one (or two) servers that share a single consumer internet connection (with no SLA) will never be more reliable.

Yes, you can get more powerful, but again, that's a business decision you have to make. Do you want power or reliability? If uptime is important to your business, then running it at home off of consumer internet is not a good idea.

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