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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

#41

Post by Tade0 »

Scoundreller wrote: post #18
amarka wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're loosing $20 worth of coins out of your pocket somewhere on the street on a yearly basis you're either dealing with a hell of a lot more coins than the average person or you're one clumsy individual.

It depends. US coins larger than 25c are uncommon. But other countries have $1 and $2 coins, with paper bills only starting at $5. Transit tokens in Toronto are tiny and worth $3. I’ve dropped a few because they catch on my phone case edge.

Recently I thought I've lost a €5 banknote because some toll machines in Italy send cash[0] flying as if they were doing it with contempt.

I found it eventually along a €2 coin somebody left there. On my way back I also found a €1 coin and a 50c one. I guess people lose a measurable amount of cash this way.

[0] Non-Italian cards don't work on Italian motorways - only cash. Knowledge I acquired through error of my own so now other people don't have to.

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

#43

Post by azeirah »

ibudiallo wrote: post #36

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…

You'd have to be doing something really computationally expensive or be running a very large operation to really need something expensive.

Simple budget web hosting packages can easily handle tens of thousands of requests per hour for like $4/month..

You're absolutely right.

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

#44

Post by mariushn »

codesections wrote: post #37

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 i…

What Netlify alternatives have you prepared? eg Github pages

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

#45

Post by Neighbor_ »

zoidb wrote: post #23

There are a lot of naysaying in the comments but I think it's a nice write-up and if you are interested in doing something like this I can say for sure it is possible based on my own experience. One of my side projects, https://cmdchallenge.com is setup almost identical. Cloudfront / api gateway / dynamodb and is covered a bit in this blog post https://about.cmdchallenge.com/building-cmdchallenge.html . My last month…

I just wanna say, thas an awesome project

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

#46

Post by shriek »

awinder wrote: post #32
malchow wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

Also, couldn't you just set a limit in your budget in AWS. That and alarms on events etc?

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

#47

Post by falcor84 »

swebs wrote: post #31
evv wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The big pitch is that you're paying a bit more in order to phase out your IT team.

Really? I have to say I don't understand it. I remember the "NoOps" movement from a few years ago and I just find the whole concept around it to be almost hilarious; kind of like Salesforce's old "No Software" logo (which is nowhere to be found in their newer marketing).

As I see it, as long as your organization has people using IT in any capacity at all, you will need someone in charge of IT Operations. Whatever you may want to call it: DevOps, or SRE, or PE, or even if you just decide it's something that each of your regular devs is going to be doing, it's a function that needs to be done.

Someone needs to be able to set up the systems, monitor them, scale them, secure them, and troubleshoot issues. It doesn't matter how well-engineered and maintained and automated the components you rely on are, they will break in various compound fractures and you will need to deal with the downtime and potential corruption to your composite system.

I'll eat my hat if you can point me towards a single non-trivial software service that has been running continuously without any "IT".

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

#48

Post by cutety »

phonon wrote: post #35
evv wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I recently had to spin up an instance of an app I work on aws, and having never really used aws outside some light s3 usage, lightsail is a god send. At work, everything we have is hosted on our own (on prem ) servers, that are either fire walled off or restricted to company login, hence why I had to spin something up on aws for demos or whatever they want to do with it. And, for my personal/hobby stuff, I just have a swarm cluster setup on DO. And as soon as I went to create an EC2 instance (I think that’s what I was looking for), I realized I had no idea what was going on. Since this was a quick little thing that was going to get almost no real usage, I didn’t want to spend several hours figuring the options and what kind of instance I needed. I just wanted to go back to good ol’ DO where I could have a new droplet spun up in like three clicks.

And then I found lightsail, when I was clicking through the million different services, and I was like holy shit, this is familiar, and in like three clicks later, I had a server running! Obviously, it doesn’t have all the features DO offers (because I imagine those can be done with other AWS services), but I didn’t need them/use them (aside from DO’s DNS). Really, my only gripe I’ve had with it so far is the OS offerings. All my servers (personal & work) are CentOS, so I was slightly annoyed when I found out I could get a CentOS server on lightsail, so I just settled with Ubuntu because that’s fine and I’m familiar enough with it.

So, if you need something hosted on AWS for whatever reason, and are not familiar with it at all, but are with something like DO/Linode, lightsail is something to look into. I think the pricing was fairly comparable to DO, maybe a little more expensive, but I’m not paying for it so I didn’t really look.

Word on the street is we’re gonna start moving a lot of our infra to AWS at work though, so I guess I should probably at least figure out how the hell EC2 works...

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

#49

Post by warrentr »

skybrian wrote: post #34

I wonder how this compares with App Engine's free tier? That's what I use for hobby projects that I don't want to pay a monthly fee on.

I do the same but haven't calculated just what the gae free tier would cover in the way the author did

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

#50

Post by simon_weber »

I recently went through this, though with the (arbitrary) goal of running for free indefinitely. This is tougher, since you can't use API Gateway and need to throttle your dynamo operations.

SQS ended up being the key to making this work: everything is asynchronous, and the js SDK is used to enqueue messages directly from the frontend.

That setup is described in https://www.simonmweber.com/2018/07/09/running-kleroteria-fo..., if you're interested.

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