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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?

#61

Post by nicoburns »

eropple wrote: post #49
ElFitz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I avoid systems like Cognito for that reason! SQS I've found to be ok when used as a backend for an abstraction. E.g. Laravel has a generic queue library that can be backed by file or redis or sql, ans using redis locally with SQS in production worked quite well with this.

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

#62

Post by voidmain0001 »

Software Engineering Daily had a recent discussion with the founder of render.com, Anurag Goel, and I learned that it provides static sites for free, and services starting at $5 so it's what I'm reviewing now. Render appears to be using K8s and Docker containers to create instances from Github repos. Anurag gave a reasonable explanation of why he thinks render.com is superior to Heroku at 29:15:5 in the transcript. https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019...

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

#63

Post by 013a »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #52
adrianN wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deploying to lambda is literally uploading a zip.

Until you need a database. And an API. And a website. And a CDN. And... And if you get as far as CloudFormation I just have one word of advice. Run!

CF isn't that bad... if you use one of the many abstraction tools like the CDK or SAM.

It's ugly. It has a TON of powerful functionality that the documentation dives into way too early for most people. It has some weird behavior, especially when you get into networking or stateful resources. It's not perfect. But it gets the job done.

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

#64

Post by jedberg »

eropple wrote: post #59
jedberg wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serverless framework has an "invoke local" feature that solved this for me. I too was annoyed at the speed of deploy.

It's not the running that's the problem--it's the dependencies. You can run Serverless on Localstack, there's a plugin for it, and you can run locally while pointing at Localstack for your "AWS" dependencies, but the impedance mismatch remains pretty high. (Also, getting a bit further away from that, I find API Gateway kinda shifty and I dislike that it's so hard to run something like NestJS inside of Serverless. Doa…

But there is no deployment delay for the dependencies, so why can't calling the dependencies live in the cloud work?

Are you saying you need an environment to test in that is 100% disconnected from the internet? Given the interconnectedness of APIs in 2019, that seems like making things harder than necessary.

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

#65

Post by emagdnim2100 »

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.

Since they added local testing support with `now dev`, I've enjoyed working with Zeit Now (https://zeit.co/now) pretty well. They have the easiest testing story amongst lambda platforms, in my opinion.

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

#66

Post by tootie »

Google Firebase has a very rich set of features and almost everything is included (but very rate-limited) in their free tier and a flat $25/mo gets you quite a bit further. On the downside, it's very much a PaaS solution so lock-in is a big concern.

https://firebase.google.com/pricing

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

#67

Post by eb0la »

mmcwilliams wrote: post #38
ljm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a bad idea if your ISP gives you a static IP and you’ve got some spare hardware lying around (just in case closing your laptop causes downtime). If you can isolate that box from the rest of your home network, even better. Personally I’ve been using $3 Lightsail instances on AWS. There’s a lot you can do with one CPU and half a gig of RAM. An MVP Rails app will squeeze into that easily enough.

Even without a static IP, a free dynamic DNS service is good enough to prototype on a local machine as long as you aren’t using enough bandwidth to tip off your ISP. At that point, however, you’ve probably got enough market validation to move to another host.

Cloudflare free tier is really good for that :-) Since all traffic ends in Cloudflare you can change an IP address and it redirects the traffic in seconds whithout having to wait for dns propagation. Try it.

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

#68

Post by organsnyder »

reilly3000 wrote: post #23
gameswithgo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand why some are downvoting this but, with consumer internet connections being 1000up/down and a threadripper giving you like 100 cores for a few bucks, this can be a very handy solution, with quicker deploys and easier management. security might be too much of a concern for some applications

I have that stack and security concerns are holding me back. Any suggestions for ways to secure a home network for public hosting?

Put the server on its own DMZ network. If your router doesn't support this, you don't have a good setup for self-hosting.

I did all of this for my family's software company 20 years ago. We were serious about it, too: SDSL line (good at the time!) with an SLA, natural gas standby generator, redundant hardware... never again. I spent all my time futzing with infrastructure rather than producing any business value.

I did learn a ton, and that continues to be valuable (it surprises me how often I'm the only dev in the room that has experience configuring IP routing). But it's a huge time-sink, and I'd never consider doing it to save money (the amount of money saved would be marginal, at best).

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

#70

Post by Hortinstein »

TheCoreh wrote: post #8

Zeit Now 2.0 has a free serverless tier: https://zeit.co/now MongoDB Atlas has a free cloud database tier: https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas

I have been running a small scoreboard on Zeit's free tier for almost 3 years now...I set it and forget it, only use it once per year and for a while i couldn't even figure out why it was still working or where it was hosted. Love Zeit!
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