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The Free Stack – Running Your Application for Free on AWS

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Re: The Free Stack – Running Your Application for Free on AWS

#31

Post by swebs »

evv wrote: post #25
anothergoogler wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a basic DO droplet, you can still do that for $5/month, and hey, if it takes off your app won't depend on a bunch of expensive proprietary software. Also I'm guessing that if cost is a concern, denial of service is preferable to blowing the bank under unanticipated high loads. Maybe I need to drink more AWS/GCP kool-aid though and see the light.

Recently I've been fascinated at gap between server providers these days. It seems each provider is either: - Enterprise public cloud, AWS/GCP/Azure, expensive but scalable and enterprise friendly - Developer public cloud, Linode/DO, cheap and easy to use Although I say that AWS/GCP/etc are expensive, they obviously have negotiable prices for large customers. I doubt the smaller providers do that. But it makes me won…

I wouldn't consider VPS providers part of "the cloud". You simply rent a (virtual) server. With AWS and the like, you pay for their automation of services. You don't need to manually deploy load balancing, CDNs, DDoS mitigation, security hardening, and the like. The big pitch is that you're paying a bit more in order to phase out your IT team.

Re: The Free Stack – Running Your Application for Free on AWS

#32

Post by awinder »

malchow wrote: post #28
awinder wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah $5 for a single point of failure in one data center of possibly questionable quality. Versus 20 a month for an app spread across availability zones for the all-in price, resilient to failure on single machines, etc. A single downtime event on a single host will likely have costs that can never be actuarially recovered from, in this head to head. Pay the $15 extra bucks.

You say that, but IME it takes lots of configuration effort and lots more AWS services in order to really get the kind of resiliency that, say, Amazon.com enjoys. And core services in core regions in AWS do go down. It doesn't not happen. I think AWS would do well to expand massively its free tier. Talented startups in my world are starting to look askance at AWS fees.

Respectfully, I disagree. If you use the services listed in the article, you're not really talking about that many more components than you're going to run on your own box. You've got a DB (dynamodb), an app server (lambda), and an http load balancer / content server (s3 / api gateway). And then you have to set up DNS anywhere but Route 53, why not. I don't see how this is dramatically a larger configuration haul compared to:

1. Nginx config & tuning 2. Postgres / MySQL config & tuning 3. App server config & tuning

It is dramatically different config & tuning, so we might exist in a time where people overvalue familiarity & it colors their impressions of effort, but I don't think it's a long-term viable crutch to lean on either.

As to core services going down, I read you loud & clear, it does happen. From my experience, it happens way less often than outages on a single box though, or even a collection of boxes you're managing. And I don't know if there has been a time where there were simultaneous region failures in AWS -- and with dynamo global tables its easier than ever to get a multi-region app launched.

Pricing is the kicker for sure though. Your bill line is going to be higher. You're also priced in though which from a biz standpoint is huge. It's very difficult to budget failure, it's probably a hidden component in your engineering team costs. For startups this can be mitigated through AWS' accelerator-linked programs though, otherwise, I'd encourage any CTO / CEO / founder team to really think about how cost is not measured in the data center bill, but in that cost, plus engineer cost, plus customer retention costs, plus opportunity cost.

Re: The Free Stack – Running Your Application for Free on AWS

#33

Post by indigodaddy »

fpgaminer wrote: post #14

That's a rather misleading title. More like, Running Your Application for Free on AWS for the first 12 months (and then $20/mo after...) I'm obsessive about optimizing cost on cloud platforms. I tend to make many, small hobby/experimental/etc projects. So I've long needed to find every way I can to ensure the costs for these projects remains small. $20/month is fine for a single project, but 20 projects? Yeah... I kn…

Note that that tiny VM/compute instance only comes with 1G of transfer, which you might use just doing a speedtest.. if anything close to normal transfer for a public facing site traverses that VM, you will see charges for sure.

Re: The Free Stack – Running Your Application for Free on AWS

#35

Post by phonon »

evv wrote: post #25
anothergoogler wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a basic DO droplet, you can still do that for $5/month, and hey, if it takes off your app won't depend on a bunch of expensive proprietary software. Also I'm guessing that if cost is a concern, denial of service is preferable to blowing the bank under unanticipated high loads. Maybe I need to drink more AWS/GCP kool-aid though and see the light.

Recently I've been fascinated at gap between server providers these days. It seems each provider is either: - Enterprise public cloud, AWS/GCP/Azure, expensive but scalable and enterprise friendly - Developer public cloud, Linode/DO, cheap and easy to use Although I say that AWS/GCP/etc are expensive, they obviously have negotiable prices for large customers. I doubt the smaller providers do that. But it makes me won…

https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/ is a good middle ground. Under the covers it's T2 + EBS + a nice bandwidth allowance, but wrapped in a simplified UI and nice flat pricing.

Re: The Free Stack – Running Your Application for Free on AWS

#36

Post by ibudiallo »

This is a nice write up. My only concern is that these days we think that the alternative to free is $40 to hundreds of dollars a months for something decent.

In the days of shared hosting, you could drop $3 to $5 to host your small website and expect your website to decently perform. But with your DO/Linode, you can expect excellent performance for the same price.

Only last month my two $5 droplets handled 5 million web requests from a viral post.

Re: The Free Stack – Running Your Application for Free on AWS

#37

Post by codesections »

I think this is the wrong way to go about building a free stack, given the vendor lock-in problem. I use a lot of free services from Netlify, for example, but I'm cautious about relying on anything that I can get only from Netlify. I feel a lot better if I can list 3+ providers who all provide a free tier that meets my needs (even if some aren't quite as present to use). That way, I know I have somewhere else to go if I need to—and I feel better than I won't need to because the provider knows I have other options.

Re: The Free Stack – Running Your Application for Free on AWS

#38

Post by fpgaminer »

indigodaddy wrote: post #33
fpgaminer wrote: post #14

That's a rather misleading title. More like, Running Your Application for Free on AWS for the first 12 months (and then $20/mo after...) I'm obsessive about optimizing cost on cloud platforms. I tend to make many, small hobby/experimental/etc projects. So I've long needed to find every way I can to ensure the costs for these projects remains small. $20/month is fine for a single project, but 20 projects? Yeah... I kn…

Note that that tiny VM/compute instance only comes with 1G of transfer, which you might use just doing a speedtest.. if anything close to normal transfer for a public facing site traverses that VM, you will see charges for sure.

Yeah, bandwidth is exceedingly expensive on all the cloud providers. If you're going to use general cloud infrastructure, that's impossible to avoid. (Again excluding simpler providers like Digital Ocean where you get a terabyte or two of bandwidth included).

I've taken to throwing CloudFlare in front of any of my personal services that serve static content and which are in danger of using a lot of bandwidth. Bandwidth served through CloudFlare is free, so as long as you're hitting their cache you won't see any charges at your cloud.

Re: The Free Stack – Running Your Application for Free on AWS

#39

Post by scarface74 »

RussianCow wrote: post #21
mhfs wrote: post #17

With all costs that goes into building a business (directly in $ or indirectly in hours) is it worth going down the path of saving money to this degree? Setup heroku in If $100/month breaks you, I think you’re in the wrong path anyways.

You're discounting hobby projects or small side businesses that don't generate a lot of revenue. For those, much more than a few bucks a month may be a deal-breaker.

I've been called a mercenary before, but the only reason I spend time working on software development "hobby projects" is with the sole aim of learning new skills that will make me more money on my job/contract work or at least keep me up to date with my skills. For that reason alone, I use AWS for side projects. Companies pay well for "AWS Architects". If I want to do a hobby project and save money, I could just as easily set up my own server and use my own gigabit home internet.

Re: The Free Stack – Running Your Application for Free on AWS

#40

Post by Drdrdrq »

pagnihotry wrote: post #7
ameliaquining wrote: post #2

What's wrong with using RDS in production? I'd rather do that than build around a vendor-lock-in Amazon offering when not strictly necessary. I'd also rather do that than administer a database myself.

Hi ameliaquining, like bootlooped pointed out, I am suggesting to not use t2.micro in production and not RDS.

Hi, thanks for the write-up, very informative! What would be the lowest instance type you would recommend for a similar setup? I have an app I'm thinking of porting to AWS...
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