First you leverage already existing blockchain technology to create simple program that allows you to access gpu, cpu, network, and storage of a pc it is installed on. Second you adverties it to people telling them they can earn cryptocash you have invented in exchange for resources used on there pc. Third any surplus of access you have sell to a third party or mine a more popular cryptocurrency.
Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?
51–60 of 145 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difficult part with AWS is local development. Waiting on AWS deploys is not a fast process and it kills momentum. LocalStack tries, but IMO it's not great.
Deploying to lambda is literally uploading a zip.
Until you need a database.
And an API.
And a website.
And a CDN.
And...
And if you get as far as CloudFormation I just have one word of advice. Run!
Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?
#53Heroku's free tier is good. GCP App Engine is pretty similar, a little more powerful, but also more limiting in how you build your app. My pick for MVPs is AWS Lambda. It's very easy to get up and running, and you get access to the rich AWS ecosystem. Yeah yeah, the "unlimited scale" benefit will be great when you're accelerating user growth, but that's not why its a good pick for MVPs. Need a cron? Not too bad on Ap…
The difficult part with AWS is local development. Waiting on AWS deploys is not a fast process and it kills momentum. LocalStack tries, but IMO it's not great.
Serverless framework has an "invoke local" feature that solved this for me. I too was annoyed at the speed of deploy.
Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?
#54I'm something of a free tier connoisseur, and recently built an entire project with 13 forever-free tiers. It was more of a personal challenge than a business decision, but it might be a good reference for what's out there: https://www.simonmweber.com/2018/07/09/running-kleroteria-fo...
Some other services not mentioned there that I've used for free recently:
- humio cloud for log aggregation
- nodequery for server monitoring (though its future is unclear)
- braintree used to waive a big chunk of payment fees ($50k?) for startups, but I'm not sure the program exists anymore
Beyond things that are literally free, I'm a big fan of cheap vps providers if your uptime can take it and you can do your own ops. One of my projects makes ~$200/month and is hosted for $6/year on a 256MB vps. Lowendtalk/Lowendbox is the usual place I find these.
Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?
#55your own computer.
I understand why some are downvoting this but, with consumer internet connections being 1000up/down and a threadripper giving you like 100 cores for a few bucks, this can be a very handy solution, with quicker deploys and easier management. security might be too much of a concern for some applications
> with consumer internet connections being 1000up/down
Step out of your Silicon Valley bubble and recognize that this doesn't apply to everyone.
I only have 30 megabit up/down with Frontier. I can get faster, but it gets expensive quick, and I don't need more than 30 mbps, even as a gamer. Xfinity only offers 150 megabit down in my neighborhood, with a puny 15 megabit up, and for twice the price.
And as others have mentioned, it creates a single point of failure and if you get hacked, your entire home network is compromised. The last thing you want to have happen is for some unsavory type to decide they don't like you or your services and DDoS your home internet connection. I've had it happen to me and it's not fun.
Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?
#56Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still more reliable and orders of magnitude more powerful than any free service. You can also buy two.
> Still more reliable and orders of magnitude more powerful than any free service. I don't think so. AWS Lambda has a generous free tier and runs on infrastructure that has constant monitoring by professionals, spread across thousands of machines in multiple datacenters all over the world, with an SLA. Your one (or two) servers that share a single consumer internet connection (with no SLA) will never be more reliable…
Either way, relying on free services you typically need a backup plan anyway. And I hardly imagine tailoring everything for amazon can be considered cheap nor sensible.
Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Deploying to lambda is literally uploading a zip.
Until you need a database. And an API. And a website. And a CDN. And... And if you get as far as CloudFormation I just have one word of advice. Run!
I used terraform instead of Cloudformation but didn't find it too terrible for what I needed. I realize that it doesn't scale very well to very complicated stuff, but we're talking about using the free tier to prototype things. I'm also not convinced that it's significantly easier to develop locally if you need all that stuff.
Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difficult part with AWS is local development. Waiting on AWS deploys is not a fast process and it kills momentum. LocalStack tries, but IMO it's not great.
Serverless framework has an "invoke local" feature that solved this for me. I too was annoyed at the speed of deploy.
It's not the running that's the problem--it's the dependencies. You can run Serverless on Localstack, there's a plugin for it, and you can run locally while pointing at Localstack for your "AWS" dependencies, but the impedance mismatch remains pretty high.
(Also, getting a bit further away from that, I find API Gateway kinda shifty and I dislike that it's so hard to run something like NestJS inside of Serverless. Doable, there are examples, but it kinda sucks.)
Re: Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?
#60Heroku's free tier is good. GCP App Engine is pretty similar, a little more powerful, but also more limiting in how you build your app. My pick for MVPs is AWS Lambda. It's very easy to get up and running, and you get access to the rich AWS ecosystem. Yeah yeah, the "unlimited scale" benefit will be great when you're accelerating user growth, but that's not why its a good pick for MVPs. Need a cron? Not too bad on Ap…
The difficult part with AWS is local development. Waiting on AWS deploys is not a fast process and it kills momentum. LocalStack tries, but IMO it's not great.
I agree; this is a rough part. There's always a rough part, no matter how you're writing your app.
I think things like the AWS SAM or LocalStack do a decent job at this. But, maybe more importantly, it requires a shift in developer thinking. Screw local development; yeah, I'll invoke locally during prototyping, but once the essential structure is done I'm going to deploy it and test directly on AWS.
I don't find the feedback cycle due to deployment time to be a blocker. SAM can deploy a function in 10 seconds. Its not an instant code reload, its not ideal, but its also not context-breaking like a 2 minute deploy would be (to be fair, SAM is capable of 1+ minute deploys, but that's usually only when you're adding new AWS resources like new buckets or event invocation rules, not when you're just changing the function code).