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Free for Developers

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Re: Free for Developers

#161

Post by kchr »

GordonS wrote: post #88
MightyOwl13 wrote: post #70

My 2 cents on this - I have used the Oracle Cloud free tier trying to get the VMs running. The default resource usage seems higher than what you would get on Hetzner/ionos/digital ocean and the resource monitors are a good chunk of that usage. Configuration was also considerably more difficult for someone with little experience such as myself... Achieving the same task (setting up a BookStackApp server) took consider…

Oracle cloud pricing seems competitive against the big 3, and providing 10TB of free egress is very generous by comparison (that'd cost you around $1k with the big 3!). But Oracle has such a terrible reputation for behaving like an absolute shit, that I've never really considered with any seriousness, or even signed up for a trial. Would be interesting to see a comparison of Oracle cloud to AWS/Azure/GCP, from the pe…

> If of course Oracle allows such comparisons in their terms and conditions...

Gold, Jerry. Gold!

Re: Free for Developers

#162

Post by stepbeek »

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.

Totally agree. I have a DO K8S cluster that we've supported since launch and I've had a single problem that was fixed by replacing a node. The Azure K8S cluster we support causes problems monthly. The client was heavily invested in an MS stack already so we picked Azure but we're likely going to get rid of it in in favour of paying a little bit more for SQL Server on AWS RDS in future.

Re: Free for Developers

#163

Post by sofixa »

deathanatos wrote: post #116
sofixa wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with Scaleway's, both just work and are fully free. Some time ago i compared them against the competition and they fared very well even against GKE: https://atodorov.me/2020/06/14/comparing-kubernetes-managed-...

I'm curious; do these host the control plane bits inside the cluster (on the VMs in the cluster, which I presume are not free)? In AKS, the API server & its backing storage, as well as most of the core controllers are "managed", in that they run somewhere not in your cluster. But then, you hit the issues where they must consume resources, and someone at the end of the day must pay for those. I'd almost rather they ru…

I think you're mistaken ( or i'm not understanding you correctly).

In a default setup vanilla Kubernetes, you have master nodes which host the master services ( etcd, kube-apiserver, etc. etc.), and worker nodes on the side.

With managed k8s, in most cases, the "control plane" ( what normally runs on the master nodes) is run by the cloud host, usually on shared instances ( Scaleway did a talk and it runs on dedicated Kubernetes clusters, in a namespace per client).

Indeed, then you're subject to limitations ( e.g. the kube-apiserver for you is limited to 1000 MB of RAM and if you need more because you do X, you're screwed), but that's always the case - if you run your own master nodes, they have limitations as well ( based on instance/server size), just usually higher. There's the added risk that another customer might sature an unlimited resources and impact your control plane.

In any case, I haven't hit any limitations with Scaleway's Kubernetes so far and haven't seen anyone talking about having hit one, while this isn't the first time i've heard about Digital Ocean. I don't know if it's due to size or because Scaleway have higher limits.

Re: Free for Developers

#164

Post by emptysongglass »

Twirrim wrote: post #101
MightyOwl13 wrote: post #70

My 2 cents on this - I have used the Oracle Cloud free tier trying to get the VMs running. The default resource usage seems higher than what you would get on Hetzner/ionos/digital ocean and the resource monitors are a good chunk of that usage. Configuration was also considerably more difficult for someone with little experience such as myself... Achieving the same task (setting up a BookStackApp server) took consider…

I'm sorry that you experienced that. I work on the team responsible for the instance agent. We're aware that there have been performance and resource issues with it, and are always trying to drive down resource usage. If you're okay without any metrics for the instance, you can always completely disable the agent. Over the last several months we've migrated most things to Go (which was always the ultimate goal), and…

On the Free Tier with your VMs it's currently impossible to get a cluster (with say MicroK8s or K3s) up and running and responding to requests. Either the free resources limits quoted are wrong or something else is afoot.

Re: Free for Developers

#166

Post by st1ck »

duskwuff wrote: post #103
vallas wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is wrong with these TLDs?

They all have very few legitimate users, and are frequently used by email spammers (typically because registrars have offered the domains at a steep discount or entirely free for the first year).

I'm sure that at least .ru and .pl have lots of legitimate users, but likely lots of spammers too.

Re: Free for Developers

#168

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

duskwuff wrote: post #105
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Prepaid cards are for making one-time payments. They are not suitable for setting up ongoing subscriptions Why? Because from the point of the view of the customer, they are the best fit for that purpose.

> Because from the point of the view of the customer From the point of view of a legitimate customer who intends to pay for a service, a prepaid card is a poor fit for an ongoing subscription, as it will stop working unpredictably when its funds are exhausted (causing it to start rejecting all charges). Optimizing for customers who intend to ditch a service without paying for it is not a goal.

I'm sorry, but this makes no sense at all. The only difference between these two scenarios is who is in a position of power. If I use a prepaid card, it's not because I intend to ditch a service, but to control the costs.

A simple example of one of the services I use, Mailerlite. When the funds are depleted, I receive an email from them they were unable to charge me this month and they downgraded me to their free plan, and they will try again in two days. I then charge my card, they charge me and everything is fine. You don't want people like me - fine, you will have less customers. And I'm a very loyal customer, cases like failed payment happen maybe once 2-3 years.

Re: Free for Developers

#169

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

ttt0 wrote: post #13
BossingAround wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my common issue with "free" services. It's free, but you have to input your credit card. Ah and also, if your website blows up, such as from being top 10 on HNews, you'll have to pay, but don't worry about that now.

I have a Google account for like 14 years or so, although I no longer use it for anything other than YouTube. Yesterday I tried to watch some age restricted video on YouTube and they've suddenly asked me to confirm my age by either giving them my credit card details or a scan of my ID. Nothing that mpv with youtube-dl couldn't solve, but still.

> asked me to confirm my age by either giving them my credit card details or a scan of my ID.

These people have no shame. Frankly, I wonder how far they will go.

Re: Free for Developers

#170

Post by GordonS »

neogodless wrote: post #112
GordonS wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious to know more about what specifically you find obtuse about pricing? I've used Azure a lot, and don't recall any ambiguous pricing.

While I was doing the "free 30 days + 12 months of free stuff", a certain level of MSSQL was listed as free, but hidden under that is creating the storage for MSSQL which is a separate and additional cost that you cannot avoid. (At least, not that I could figure out.) By the end of my 30 days, I found the bare minimum performing low volume .NET + SQL on Azure was going to be $30+/month even for just a prototype/devel…

You do get some free storage with the free tier database, but it is only a paltry 32MB. Additional storage is only $0.221/GB/m though. The paid cheapest SQL database (B0) is only $5/m, which comes with 2GB of storage. In practise, this is absolutely fine for light usage.

By .NET + SQL, I assume you mean you were using an App Service? They come with a lot of convenience, but I definitely agree that they are too expensive, especially when considering the level of compute you get. I raised this with someone from Microsoft before, and they said they were confident the value offered was worth it.

There is a free tier for App Service though. It's a shared compute model - I tried it a while back, and the performance was totally fine for light usage.

I wouldn't try to run Windows Server on a B1S, as they only have 1GB of RAM :) You might just about get away with it for Server Nano, but I've never actually used it. Best stick with Linux or BSD for these tiny VMs.

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