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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

#51

Post by indigodaddy »

fpgaminer wrote: post #38
indigodaddy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Bandwid…

Good point, however, may as well just use Netlify if we're just talking about static assets. Anyway, the 600M always free VM instance is a pretty awesome freebie for sure. There's plenty you can do with it, even if you have to end up paying some cents for BW.

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

#53

Post by rpeden »

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.

With DO and Linode adding things like block storage volumes, object storage, and load balancing, they're becoming more than just simple VPS providers.

They definitely don't offer anywhere near as many services as Google, MS, Amazon, or even Alibaba's cloud offerings. But they're becoming pretty decent 'cloud lite' providers who cover what's needed for plenty of folks and companies.

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

#54

Post by joaomacp »

cutety wrote: post #48
phonon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

EC2 has a lot of options indeed. I just searched YouTube for "EC2 free tier setup" and clicked what the guy clicked (t2.micro, no more than 30GB block storage, and you can get an Elastic IP* for free, as long as you immediately attach it to the instance).

* - when you stop and start an instance, it will change IP address. But if you attach it an Elastic IP, it stays the same.

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

#55

Post by indigodaddy »

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…

Wow, just want to say nice work on whatever validation method you are using...

  # You have a new challenge!
  # There is a file named "access.log" in the
  # current directory. Print the contents.
  # 
  bash(0)> tac access.log | tac
  163.56.115.58 - - [09/Jan/2017:22:29:57 +0100] "GET 
  /posts/2/display HTTP/1.0" 200 3240
  75.113.188.234 - - [09/Jan/2017:22:30:43 +0100] "GET 
  /posts/foo?appID=xxxx HTTP/1.0" 200 1116
  69.16.40.148 - - [09/Jan/2017:22:34:33 +0100] "GET 
  /pages/create HTTP/1.0" 500 3471
  225.219.54.140 - - [09/Jan/2017:22:35:30 +0100] "GET 
  /posts/foo?appID=xxxx HTTP/1.0" 500 2477
  207.243.19.2 - - [09/Jan/2017:22:38:03 +0100] "GET 
  /bar/create HTTP/1.0" 200 1116
  199.37.62.156 - - [09/Jan/2017:22:42:18 +0100] "GET 
  /posts/1/display HTTP/1.0" 200 2477
  55.74.240.123 - - [09/Jan/2017:22:44:25 +0100] "POST 
  /posts/1/display HTTP/1.0" 200 3471
  251.111.109.143 - - [09/Jan/2017:22:49:02 +0100] "GET 
  /posts/foo?appID=xxxx HTTP/1.0" 200 2477
  101.163.230.250 - - [09/Jan/2017:22:52:31 +0100] "DELETE 
  /posts/2/display HTTP/1.0" 404 2477
  200.19.168.148 - - [09/Jan/2017:22:57:11 +0100] "GET 
  /posts/foo?appID=xxxx HTTP/1.0" 200 3471
  #     Correct!
  # You have a new challenge!
  # Print the last 5 lines of "access.log".

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

#56

Post by scarface74 »

falcor84 wrote: post #47
swebs wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

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.

That's true, but I don't need to worry about the server that my database, load balancer, queuing system, RedisCache, storage, etc. is running on. I only have to worry about my applications and the actual database. If I need to provision more hardware, it's a click of a button (well actually updating my CloudFormation template).

There is an entire level of both hardware and operating system maintenance that I don't have to worry about.

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

#57

Post by copperx »

Willamin wrote: post #30

There are ways to actually run your application for free using the big players' free services. One route I've looked at for e-commerce is storing product data on Stripe, hosting product pages with Netlify, pulling product data during static site build, triggering a build when Stripe data gets updated, and using Netlify's wrapper around AWS Lambda for free FaaS (AWS Lambda can be free forever, but you also need AWS AP…

All of this work and complete dependency on third party services is worth it? Isn't much easier to create a lightweight app in say, Go and SQLite, and pay a so-low-to-be-insignificant monthly fee?

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

#58

Post by icedchai »

indigodaddy wrote: post #55
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…

Wow, just want to say nice work on whatever validation method you are using... # You have a new challenge! # There is a file named "access.log" in the # current directory. Print the contents. # bash(0)> tac access.log | tac 163.56.115.58 - - [09/Jan/2017:22:29:57 +0100] "GET /posts/2/display HTTP/1.0" 200 3240 75.113.188.234 - - [09/Jan/2017:22:30:43 +0100] "GET /posts/foo?appID=xxxx HTTP/1.0" 200 1116 69.16.40.148 -…

He probably just validates the output. You can do "whatever" as long as it generates the output.

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

#60

Post by mamurphy »

cunninghamd wrote: post #59

I think the complexity of AWS's pricing is what led me to use the simplicity of AWS' lightsail offering. No free tier, but the free tier is frought with potential for overrun. Lightsail is not. https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/

That looks a lot like Digital Ocean's offering - anyone tried both who can compare Lightsail vs DO?

edit: Blog post that says they are about equal, Lightsail has AWS integration but DO is a but more full-featured as of the writing (https://cloudacademy.com/blog/amazon-lightsail-vs-digital-oc...)

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