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Free for Developers

free-for.dev

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Re: Free for Developers

#121

Post by kodah »

Vaslo wrote: post #118

So question for the masses, I’ve wanted to setup a personal account on Google cloud, azure etc and take advantage of free stuff but I am terrified something will happen and I’ll mess something up or someone will mess it up for me and I’ll be out hundreds on my credit card. Any suggestions here? Great list.

Meh, I hate the idea of individual devs signing up for clouds like AWS, GCP, or Azure. These are huge cost machines and are designed to serve fast moving startups and hulking enterprises. The best you can do is setup account limits and alerts.

The real answer is that if you have an understanding of networks and systems, then the cloud is just a data center with different considerations. Your company should be giving you resources like sandbox accounts that you can play in. This is how you'll really learn.

Re: Free for Developers

#122

Post by manishsharan »

arcticfox wrote: post #85
deathanatos wrote: post #82

> Azure Kubernetes Service - Managed Kubernetes service, free cluster management Since this one is the bane of my existence at the moment. Yeah, this statement is technically correct, it is technically free, but you still pay for the VMs that are part of the cluster, and their disks. (Unless they can qualify for some other "free" metric.) But we've been using this, and we've had lots of spans of time where the manage…

FWIW if anyone's looking, the hosted DigitalOcean Kubernetes clusters are fantastic. Despite being very early adopters, we've only had one issue and when we pointed the finger at them...the DO k8s team immediately diagnosed the issue, and it was our own fault. Woops.

QQ: can DO k8s cluster scale up automatically with load ? And ,more importantly, can it scale down automatically when the load goes down.

Re: Free for Developers

#123

Post by pkage »

Vaslo wrote: post #118

So question for the masses, I’ve wanted to setup a personal account on Google cloud, azure etc and take advantage of free stuff but I am terrified something will happen and I’ll mess something up or someone will mess it up for me and I’ll be out hundreds on my credit card. Any suggestions here? Great list.

I strongly recommend setting up and using virtual credit cards, you can use them to enforce spending limits and spend maximums. There are several services that allow this, for example my CC company supports them directly or there are several services that let you set them up backed by a debit card. That way, if your hosting provider overcharges you it'll just bounce.

Re: Free for Developers

#124

Post by mycall »

pkage wrote: post #123
Vaslo wrote: post #118

So question for the masses, I’ve wanted to setup a personal account on Google cloud, azure etc and take advantage of free stuff but I am terrified something will happen and I’ll mess something up or someone will mess it up for me and I’ll be out hundreds on my credit card. Any suggestions here? Great list.

I strongly recommend setting up and using virtual credit cards, you can use them to enforce spending limits and spend maximums. There are several services that allow this, for example my CC company supports them directly or there are several services that let you set them up backed by a debit card. That way, if your hosting provider overcharges you it'll just bounce.

PayPal can provide virtual credit cards, if I remember correctly.

Re: Free for Developers

#125

Post by lemarchr »

pkage wrote: post #123
Vaslo wrote: post #118

So question for the masses, I’ve wanted to setup a personal account on Google cloud, azure etc and take advantage of free stuff but I am terrified something will happen and I’ll mess something up or someone will mess it up for me and I’ll be out hundreds on my credit card. Any suggestions here? Great list.

I strongly recommend setting up and using virtual credit cards, you can use them to enforce spending limits and spend maximums. There are several services that allow this, for example my CC company supports them directly or there are several services that let you set them up backed by a debit card. That way, if your hosting provider overcharges you it'll just bounce.

Bills don't just magically go away if you refuse to pay them.

Re: Free for Developers

#126

Post by jojobas »

lemarchr wrote: post #125
pkage wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly recommend setting up and using virtual credit cards, you can use them to enforce spending limits and spend maximums. There are several services that allow this, for example my CC company supports them directly or there are several services that let you set them up backed by a debit card. That way, if your hosting provider overcharges you it'll just bounce.

Bills don't just magically go away if you refuse to pay them.

They do to a degree. Nobody's going to court over a $200 bounced charge that you could argue shouldn't have been there in the first place. Most services will just close your account and move on with their lives.

Re: Free for Developers

#127

Post by pabs3 »

Twirrim wrote: post #108
valzam wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that Oracle had more to do with that than the fact that it was free... Using the paid version would probably have been even more difficult.

I appreciate there's an uphill battle here to gain HN user trust. It is Oracle after all. OCI is a very different from what you've seen from Oracle in the past. It was created by ex-AWS, Azure, and GCP engineers, based on our collective experiences within those platforms. From some regards you might say we are to Oracle, what Azure was to Microsoft earlier on. A wildly different way of doing things. Using standard /…

Is Oracle going to start putting their OCI API client code into distros and get distros official accounts for distributing images etc? (Debian would be my first choice for this)

Re: Free for Developers

#128

Post by ztjio »

manishsharan wrote: post #122
arcticfox wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW if anyone's looking, the hosted DigitalOcean Kubernetes clusters are fantastic. Despite being very early adopters, we've only had one issue and when we pointed the finger at them...the DO k8s team immediately diagnosed the issue, and it was our own fault. Woops.

QQ: can DO k8s cluster scale up automatically with load ? And ,more importantly, can it scale down automatically when the load goes down.

Neither of those functions are something Kubernetes does itself at all. For clusters to have that kind of functionality it's usually implemented with something like cluster-autoscaler. If it's not implemented with cluster autoscaler there's a chance you have a really annoying experience when nodes go away since the orchestrator doesn't know and takes a while to decide the node is gone and things should be cleaned up/rescheduled.

Now that info aside, they do support cluster autoscaler.

https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/kubernetes/how-to/autoscal...

Or maybe it's more appropriate to say that Cluster Autoscaler supports them? This tool (CA) does scaling in both directions and is highly configurable. At least, it is for other cloud vendors so I'd guess it's going to be so here too.

Re: Free for Developers

#129

Post by jakequade »

Vaslo wrote: post #118

So question for the masses, I’ve wanted to setup a personal account on Google cloud, azure etc and take advantage of free stuff but I am terrified something will happen and I’ll mess something up or someone will mess it up for me and I’ll be out hundreds on my credit card. Any suggestions here? Great list.

Grab a revolut account. They're free, and they have a tool called 'digital temporary card' that is good for one use. After the card number is used, it's cycled.

Not affiliated, I'm in Aus and I use my temp card for anything I don't want to be ongoing. Doubles as a breach safeguard (my credit card involved in a DB dump doesn't matter if it was a one-off number).

There's other good reasons to use revolut but will save it :)

Re: Free for Developers

#130

Post by gm »

Vaslo wrote: post #118

So question for the masses, I’ve wanted to setup a personal account on Google cloud, azure etc and take advantage of free stuff but I am terrified something will happen and I’ll mess something up or someone will mess it up for me and I’ll be out hundreds on my credit card. Any suggestions here? Great list.

Set up a budget. At least Azure has those, and you can set whatever limit you want. If you hit the limit, the access will be cut off (and VMs shut down, etc). Your data will not be lost, though. When the new billing period rolls around, all will be back to normal.

I highly recommend something like this if you want to learn the cloud and do not have an employer to sponsor an account for you.

All these suggestions of using a throw-away CC number to avoid paying the bill are just unethical, IMO. No need to resort to those measures.

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